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Class JJ 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The 

"Flower of G foster" 



The 

"Flower of G foster" 

J 

*TE 

Author of'T/te City of Beautiful Nonsense" 



BY 

E. TEMPLE THURSTON 



ILLUSTRATED BY 

W. R. DAKIN 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1912 



HA&3o 



Copyright, 1911, by 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

Published 1912 



THE QUINN 4 BODEN CO. PRESS 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



JCIA303279 



TO 

Bellwattle 



London, 

August 191 1 

My dear Bell wattle, 

A wedding present is always 
inadequate. I have no doubt if I gave you a dog, 
you would be best pleased with that; but you have 
Dandy, and lavish such affection on him as makes 
me at times regard him in the light of a thief; I 
have thought of other things besides dogs, and am 
reduced at last to offering you this — this chronicle of 
the journey of the Flower of Gloster. If ever it takes 
you — only for one hour — away from the need of 
forgetfulness to the joy of remembrance, then in some 
sense this little wedding present will not be so in- 
adequate as it may seem. 

Your Cruikshank. 

P.S. — Thirteen copies count as twelve. This 
will well-nigh lead you into the higher mathematics 
when you come to calculate your royalties. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I The Discoverer 

II The "Flower of Gloster" 

III The "Flower of Gloster" — con 

tinned .... 

IV Oxford .... 
V Oxford — continued . 

VI Joseph Phipkin— Owner 

VII The Bargain — Oxford 

VIII The Beginning of the Journey 

IX John Aikin and Anna L^titia 

X Why I Would Like It to Have 
Been Anna L^titia . 

XI Shipton-on-Cherwell 

XII Shipton-on-Cherwell— continued 

XIII Shipton-on-Cherwell— continued 

XIV Somerton .... 
XV The Trade in Old Bits . 

XVI Cropredy .... 

XVII The First Patchwork Quilt 
Cropredy .... 

XVIII The Red Lion— Cropredy 



PAGE 
I 

6 

12 

15 

22 

25 
32 

37 
40 

47 
49 
57 
63 
68 

74 
80 

89 
93 



IX 



X 


CONTENTS 




CHAPTER 




PAGE 


XIX 


The History of Cropredy . 


97 


XX 


The Spare Bootlace . 


IOI 


XXI 


School- Days .... 


1 06 


XXII 


Pour Passer Doucement Ma Vie 


I 10 


XXIII 


The Hedgerow Philosophy 


114 


XXIV 


Warwick 


121 


XXV 


The Gate into the Black 






Country .... 


125 


XXVI 


The Stratford-on-Avon Canal 


132 


XXVII 


Lowson Ford .... 


138 


XXVIII 


Yarningdale Farm . 


148 


XXIX 


The Compleat Angler 


iS3 


XXX 


Preston Bagot .... 


159 


XXXI 


A Cure for Trippers . 


165 


XXXII 


An Old Nunnery 


169 


XXXIII 


Fladbury Mill .... 


174 


XXXIV 


Wool- Gathering 


184 


XXXV 


Apple Blossom .... 


191 


XXXVI 


Tewkesbury .... 


196 


XXXVII 


The Golden Valley . 


208 


XXXVIII 


The Golden Valley — continued 


217 


XXXIX 


Hard-Boiled Eggs 


225 


XL 


Dietetics 


234 


XLI 


The Last Lock .... 


240 



LIST OF PLATES 

The Golden Valley .... Frontispiece 

Cropredy ..... To face page 98 

Fladbury " " " 180 

Bredon Hill . . " " " 188 

The Golden Valley . . " " " 214 

Kempsford . . . . " " " 238 



THE 

"FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

i 

THE DISCOVERER 

I HAVE ever believed that the world is a place to 
wander in. Indeed, if Time be made for slaves, 
then Space is made for freemen. It is only the 
freeman who, one bright morning, when the 
long brown buds like cornucopias are bursting on 
the beech tree, can sling a knapsack across his 
shoulders, drop the key of the house in the deepest 
corner of his pocket, and set out down the road of 
discovery. 

An open door, they say, will tempt a saint. If 
the temptation be to wander forth into a wide and 
wonderful world where every man, if he have but 
the heart for it, may be his own discoverer, then I 
can well believe the truth of all they say. Now, of 
open doors there may be many, and of saints who 
yield to their temptation, no less. But the heart for 
the spirit of discovery, that is a different business 
altogether. You will as like find it in a sinner as a 
saint. There are few, indeed, who have it now. 
For this, I would urge you, is the spirit of 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



discovery; not merely that setting of one 1 s prow 
towards the far horizon of the unknown — that is 
the spirit of adventure. The spirit of discovery lies 
in the eye and in the mind. He whose sight is 
young enough to find anew the world that has been 
found by others, he is the discoverer and, by right of 
that power of which he holds the secret, a man may 

reveal new worlds wher- 
ever he goes. 

There is none too 
much of that spirit left 
in any of us now. 
Guide-books and the 
like have taken all the 
freshness out of our 
point of view. A man 
travels to see what oth- 
ers have seen before 
him; he buys his beau- 
ties of the road at second 
hand. They go so far 
as to give him reduction 
for a quantity. Cheap tours comprising the greatest 
number of sights in the shortest space of time are 
innovations our Grandfathers would have shuddered 
at. They read books of travel in those days. But 
your guide is no traveller. He knows his beauties 
off by heart as the verger knows the little history of 
his church. So well does he know them, moreover, 




THE DISCOVERER 3 

that they are no longer beauties for him, but only 
catchwords set to trap the tourist's ear. 

" This Tower," says he, with a ready eye to 
mark his listener's face, " was built in the year of 

our Lord " And when he says " the year of our 

Lord," he means to astonish you then. 

I remember the showman in the Whispering 
Gallery of St. Paul's. As I entered by the narrow 
doorway into that vast space beneath the dome, a 
tiny little man in a black gown took me in hand at 
once, at once began pouring forth his monotonous 
doggerel of facts — figures of height and breadth 
and depth. The Lord himself knows what they 
were, for I have long forgotten them. 

" Now go," said he, " round to the other side, 
and I'll whisper to you." 

In the hands of such men as these, somehow or 
other, one is numbed into obedience. Meekly I went. 
Then, as he leant his head against the wall, there 
came from the lips of this insignificant little creature 
a voice which, in one great volume of sound, shook 
me and made me tremble as it thundered by. 

" Can you hear what I'm saying? " shouted the 
voice. 

When I replied that I could, he nodded his head 
to me across the mighty gulf and smiled as one who 
well approves of himself. Had he been Sir Christo- 
pher himself, he could not have looked more pleased. 

For a few moments, then, I sat there opposite the 



4 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

door looking down alone into the chasm of the nave. 
But only for a few moments was I allowed to marvel 
at the wonder of it all; only for a few moments was 
I allowed to discover it for myself. At the very 
commencement of my meditations, there entered two 
more visitors through the door, and the little man 
began again his miserable rigmarole of heights and 
breadths and depths. 

I bethought me then of an excellent thing to do, 
and, leaning my head against the wall, I whispered 
in the sweetest voice I knew: 

" For God's sake stop that silly nonsense!" 

For the brief space of time in which my voice 
must take to travel round, I looked across and waited. 
A second later I saw him stagger, and the visitors, 
frightened, looked about them as the thunder of my 
words resounded in their ears. 

A whispering gallery, you may perceive, has its 
advantages; but a guide, so far as I have ever been 
able to discover, has none. He would willingly ruin 
every illusion you might have. 

" Around that corner," says he, " you will come 
face to face with St. Mark's and the four bronze 
horses " 

But for Heaven's sake, say I, let me turn the 
corner for myself. What else was a corner made for 
but to hide at once the beauties it reveals! 

Yet that is never the spirit of the guide, for the 
guide-book is his litany. 



THE DISCOVERER 5 

" I'll go,' 1 said I one day, " where are no guides 
and scarce a map is printed. Who knows his way 
about the canals of England?" 

" They begin at Regent's Park," said a man. 

"And then?" I asked him. 

"There's one passes near Slough on the Great 
Western. I've seen it from the train." 

" If that's all that's known about them," said I, 
" I'll get a barge myself and go on till I stop." 



II 

THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

THESE things are easily said. It is the devil 
and all to accomplish them. Everyone I 
knew I asked, " Where can I get a barge? " 
It was a foolish question to make, and 
one to which, as often as not, I received the foolish 
reply, " What for? " 

What in the name of Heaven could one want a 
barge for, unless it were in which to travel on those 
waters where all barges may be found? Out of its 
element, doubtless, it is the ugliest thing the hand of 
man ever created; but sinking low in the still waters 
of those silent canals, its blunt, good-natured nose 
thrusting the long ripples to either side, travelling 
from one old town to another with its happy-go- 
lucky two and three miles an hour, it is the most 
wonderful vehicle in the world. 

There came a time when I grew sick of that 
answer. Then I went down to the Regent's Park 
Basin, where all those barges going east, west, and 
north, collect and discharge their cargo. 

6 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 7 

"Hire a barge?" said they. "Where do you 
want to go? " 

"Anywhere," I replied. "You don't think I'm 
looking for an express method of conveyance." 

They gazed from one to the other with amuse- 
ment that was more or less respectful. The world 
is full of fools, of course, and none so great a fool is 
there as he who would think to find time for play 
with that which is another man's labour. They did 
not say as much as this. They thought it in their 
several ways, every single one of them. I doubt if 
I should have shown as much respect to the man 
who came and asked me where he could get pens, 
ink, and paper, for that he was going to spend his 
holidays a-writing. 

But the bargee, notwithstanding all that reputation 
he has earned, has the innate sense of politeness which 
only the breeding of nature can give to a man. More 
than half his days, gliding peacefully through those 
winding stretches of water, with the great breadth 
of a glorious country on either side of him, he is in 
closest touch with the best that nature has to give. 
Often without education, without even the knowledge 
of how to read or write, he lives a life of complete 
and untouched simplicity. He is a law almost to 
himself. 

Now they would have you believe, the apostles 
of civilisation, that man is a social creature, thriving, 
developing, progressing through the medium of the 



8 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

community. That elusive word — gentleman — which 
no one understands and few can emulate, has been 
coined by a class calling itself Society. Society has 
bred the gentleman, just as the Irish have bred the 
race-horse, the only difference being that the Irish- 
man knows a race-horse when he sees it. 

But just as the race-horse is not the only animal 
of that species in existence, so the gentleman is not 
the only man. What is more, he is not the only 
gentleman. The fact of the matter is, Society has 
lost its cunning in breeding the race. They have 
outbred the stock which made them famous. Nature 
can breed far finer gentlemen now than ever Society 
puts forth into the field. For it is not luxury 
which is the food for the species, but that work 
and that labour bringing the sweat honestly to the 
brow. And the bargee, for all his rough-and-readi- 
ness, is one of the many gentlemen of Nature I 
have met 

When, failing to discover at the Regent's Park 
Basin where I might hire a barge, I betook myself 
to headquarters and made inquiries at the offices of 
one of the canal navigations, I was told that I 
probably did not realise the class of men with whom 
I should have to mix. 

" They're not gentlemen, you know," said the 
officer with a smile. " And if you take out a barge 
yourself, you'll probably come a great deal in contact 
with them." 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 9 

" Now what," said I, " do you mean by a gentle- 
man? " 

I think his smile was compassionate. For the 
moment he believed I was as ignorant of the matter 
as himself. Whereupon he shrugged his shoulders 
as one who would say: " My dear sir — a gentleman? 
To a gentleman the term explains itself." 

But it was his shrug of the shoulders that I 
answered. What is more, I took the opportunity 
of translating it as I chose. 

" You see," said I, " how unhappy a word that is. 
A shrug of the shoulders won't dispose of it. Never- 
theless, in your opinion it comes to this — the bargee 
is not a gentleman. But if neither you nor I know 
what a gentleman is — for I swear to God that I 
don't, — why should it concern you that I hire a 
barge, or me that I must mix with bargees in the 
hiring of it? " 

Now the offices of the canal navigation are dusty 
rooms. The dust hangs heavily on all the maps that 
surround the walls. Were it the office of a mortuary 
or the room of the little man who kept the records 
in the Morgue, there would be more business done 
there in an idle day. As it is, so far as I could see, 
the only company the officer keeps are his papers. 
To be suddenly confronted, then, by a strange in- 
dividual, who immediately plunges into some abstruse 
controversy as to the meaning of the word gentle- 
man, was a little more than he could bear. I think 



io THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

some of the dust of the office must long have got 
into his brain, for the more I said, the more confused 
he grew. Had I brought a feather brush with me, 
and ruthlessly swept the dust from every shelf and 
cranny in the place, I could scarce have upset him 
more. 

When, then, I saw him growing red in the face, 
I changed the subject. 

" In any case, 1 ' said I, " it concerns me more to 
know if I can hire a barge." 

" You can hire twenty,' 1 he replied. " But I 
prefer you did it than I. Do you intend to sleep 
on board? 11 

I confessed it had been my intention. 

" Then you won^ want an old manure 
barge?" 

" I might feel a prejudice against that," 
said I. 

He fell to looking over some papers. Presently 
he raised his head. 

" There^ a barge at Oxford," he informed me. 
" She used to be on the Thames and Severn Canal — 
carried stone — wood sometimes. She's just been done 
up at Braunston and brought along there. If you 
went down there at once and saw the owner, he 
might hire her to you for a couple of months, and 
make a bit out of it himself." 

"What's her name?" said I. 

" The Flower of Gloster." 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 1 1 

Now when he said that, then I knew she was 
mine. The Flower of Gloster! The name alone 
would have disinfected her of all the disagreeable 
odours in the world. 



■-M 




Ill 

THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

continued 

IN matters of this kind, a fine sounding name has 
much to do with the success of the venture. 
Alice Louise may have been at heart a noble 
creature, meaning all that was admirable in a 
wife to the man who named his barge after her. But 
to you who know nothing of Alice Louise and all her 
sterling qualities, there is not that sweetness in the 
name which will destroy a cargo of gas-water of all 
its unpleasant odours. 

If the clothes he wears, and the title he has won, 
have anything to do with your respect of a man, then 
look to the painting and the naming of your barge. 
And if she have half so fine a name as the Flower of 
Gloster, take her at once as I did. A coat of paint 
is, any day, an easier matter than a christening. 

For Fate orders these things much to her own 
liking. All the ships that ever made history for 
England were nobly called. The Bellerophon! There 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 13 

was a boastful name, well chosen to carry into ban- 
ishment the greatest maker of history the world has 
ever seen. Fate looked to it, too, that he was greatly 
named as well. What but great things could come 



. - ' 









V 



to pass on the Victory? Where better could they 
happen than at Trafalgar? 

With such a name as Nelson, battles at sea were 
made to be won; though, indeed, I knew a bank 
clerk of that surname who never so much as won the 
approbation of his manager. True, they had not 
christened him Horatio, and doubtless that made 
much of the difference. 

" But all this," said I, as the officer regarded 
my sudden decision with amazement, " all this is 



14 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



a matter of sentiment and comes nowhere in our 
reckoning." 

" 'Twould be more to the point," replied he, 
" if you inquire the cost of the hiring." 

" At any price," said I, " the Flower of Gloster 
would be cheap." 

Whereupon he settled back in his chair, together 
with the dust that I had raised upon my entrance, 
and, thanking him, as any man should be thanked 
for coming so far out of his groove as to speak to me, 
I left him and set off for Oxford. 




IV 



OXFORD 

" Down in the town, off the bridges and the grass 
They are sweeping up the leaves to let the people pass, 
Sweeping up the old leaves, golden-reds and browns, 
Whilst the men go to lecture with the wind in their gowns." 

FRANCES CORNFORD wrote that of Cam- 
bridge — of an autumn morning, too. It 
kept singing in my head, nevertheless, as 
I walked through Oxford that morning in 
May to find my Flower 
of Gloster. 

If a stanza be true 
in autumn, it is true in 
all the seasons beside. 
It mattered little wheth- 
er it were Oxford or 
Cambridge to me. That 
the leaves were young 
and golden, just topping 
the old walls of the col- 
lege gardens, giving you 

pictures framed preciously through the narrow door- 
ways of the college gates; that it would be whole 

15 




16 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

months of spring and summer before they fell again 
and raced with the gusty winds of autumn down the 
streets, made no difference to the simple truth of that 
little rhyme. The men were going to lecture, and 
the wind was in their gowns. So I lilted the lines to 
myself as I found my way down to the canal side. 

" I ran out to the apple tree and plucked an apple down, 
And all the bells were ringing in the old grey Town." 

" 'Tis the old grey Town that matters," said I. 
" We shall have the apples fast enough." 

I don't care how dull or dusty may be the minds 
of the dons and pedagogues who live within the 
walls of Oxford now. It is the old grey Town that 
matters and the few customs that remain. 

One New Year's eve I was taken to the college 
of Magdalen to hear the carols sung. In a great hall 
with massive ceiling and with panelled walls we 
were given mulled claret to drink, from Elizabethan 
silver jugs; plates of mince-pies were handed round; 
all the old customs were observed to the last letter. 
At some short time before midnight every illumi- 
nation was extinguished. Then by the light of a 
great fire burning brightly in the open grate, with 
the reflection of its flames dancing on the polished 
oak, winking from the silver jugs upon the long 
refectory tables, the choir began its singing of the 
old-time English carols. But it is not that which I 



OXFORD 17 

remember best of all. As the hour of midnight 
struck and the New Year was on the very threshold 
of the world, they flung wide open the great windows 
and, through the old grey Town, we heard the peal- 
ing of a hundred bells. It was as if each one of them 
with ringing voice were crying out, " The Old Year 
is dead — long live the New! " 

But for their buildings and their customs, all 
Oxford might be dead. Even now it is a city of 
dust and shadows. The masters of learning who sit 
in the deep-welled seats of their college windows, 
gazing across the grave, green gardens, are no more 
than the myriad particles of decay which slowly have 
been settling there upon the mullions for the last few 
hundred years. 

"When a man has had no Alma Mater other 
than the light of day and such odd jests of chance as 
circumstance has chosen to shield him with, then," 
thought I, " this is just the sort of thing he will be 
bound to say of the universities." 

It is of more concern to everyone that I found 
my barge. But before that be come to, I must say 
some word of the offices of the Oxford and Birming- 
ham Canal Navigation. How long they have been 
employed to that purpose, I do not know. In com- 
parison with the age of the building it cannot have 
been for many years. It is built of that grey stone 
from which all the colleges have been erected, and, 
by now, the yellow growth of age has toned it to 







■m ; 



By a narrow wooden door . . . you are given sudden entrance. 



OXFORD 19 

wonderful shades which bring colour both to your 
imagination and your eye. 

By a narrow wooden door in a high stone wall 
you are given sudden entrance to a garden bright with 
colour, warm with the scent of flowers. There, in 
spring, the violet aubrietia blends its masses with 
the faint blue of the periwinkle; the double arabis 
spreads its carpet of snow before the purple iris and 
the scarlet tulip buds. 

In the midst of those drab surroundings where 
lies the canal quite close to the railway station, this 
unexpected oasis of colour, hidden beyond high walls 
which keep it from the eyes of passers-by, is like a 
jewel set in lead. It was by chance I visited it — the 
same chance which has ever been my Alma Mater. 

And on to this garden look the high windows of 
the canal company's offices. When I came there a 
shower of rain had just been falling and a thousand 
glittering diamond drops of water were hanging 
from the points of the leaves on the lilac trees. The 
air was cool, and the whole place was fresh with the 
light of a bright blue sky of spring. 

" Were I the canal company's officer in Oxford," 
said I to the manager in charge, " this should be 
my pension." 

" I call it part of my salary, myself," said he. 
" Come out and see a new sort of sweet-scented stock 
I've got. One plant will scent a whole room." 

We went out to a little glass-house where he 



20 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

forces his young shoots and keeps the prize speci- 
mens of his horticulture. A tortoise was in somnolent 
charge of the whole establishment. If Bellwattle 
were here, thought I, how she would surprise 
the canal company's officer with an address to the 
tortoise! There was an animal who would have 
looked after her interests and God's as well without 
so much as making a fuss over the serving of two 
masters! 

With an animated expression in his face, he 
expatiated to me upon one plant after another. I 
forget what he called this; I forget what he called 
that. They were all beautiful and they all had Latin 
names. When chance is your Alma Mater, you 
must pretend a knowledge of the dead languages and 
get along through this life as best you can. 

"Indeed!" said I — and "Yes!" said I to every 
name he gave. 

Ignorance is a luxury only to be afforded by the 
very, very wise. 

Could I but quote Latin, doubtless there would be 
much respect for me. But that I don't, probably 
loses me no more. There are always those who do 
not understand, and to put a man at that disadvantage 
when you have him in conversation is a risking of all 
his approval. 

I only thought well of my canal official's knowl- 
edge because I contrived to deceive him that I knew 
as much myself. Had I known that he was aware 



OXFORD 21 

of my ignorance, I should have disliked him very 
much indeed. 

" What's your busiest time of the year here? " 
I asked him, when he had filled my head with 
names. 

" Spring," he replied. 

I looked at the rows of boxes with their young 
shoots neatly thinned. 

" I suppose it must be," said I. 



V 
OXFORD— continued 

BUT they know such a deuce of a lot in 
Oxford. They are too clever for me by half. 
Into a curio shop, calling itself Lares & 
Penates, I walked — as is my weakness wher- 
ever a curio shop is to be found, — and there bought 
some little thing that had the taste of age about it. It 
was not that antiquity of which they make a special 
study in Birmingham, despatching to the old houses 
in the old towns of England where they will tell you 
it has been in the family for generations. Its age, at 
least, was genuine. Not that I know — but I say so. 

" Send it round," said I, " to the inn where I 
am staying. I'll pay on delivery." 

And round it came in the care of a young man 
of twenty, who deposited it on my table and smiled. 
It was a warm day and, taking out his handkerchief, 
he wiped the perspiration from his brow. 

" That will be another sixpence," said I to myself. 
It was as plain as writing it on the bill. 

"And to whom do I make out the cheque? " I asked. 

" Lairs and Penaits," said he. 



OXFORD 23 

I looked up with my pen raised. 

" Lairs and Penaits," he repeated. 

"Will they understand that at the bank?" I 
inquired. For, mind you, I had not then seen their 
name above the door. 

" Oh yes — Lairs and Penaits — they'll understand 
it all right. It means 'ouseold gods." 

Then I remembered. Latin syntax! It made 
me feel quite young again. 

" Common are to either sex, 
Artifex and opifex." 

A doggerel rhyme of words which play some 
nasty tricks with your Latin exercise whenever you 
are fool enough to use them. 

" You must forgive my asking," said I. 

" Oh well — it ain't everybody as knows," he 
replied. " Not even in Oxford. It's only when 
you're heducated, of course." 

I took my place without a word. 

" I don't say that meaning nothin'," he con- 
tinued. Perhaps he saw the look of humility on 
my face, and was thinking of his sixpence. No 
man will pay for the virtue of humility. It is not 
cheap at any price. Certainly it is not so cheap 
as it feels. Wherefore, hastening to reassure 
me, he added: "I only came across it myself 
by chanst." 



24 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



"How's that?" said I. 

" Well," he replied, " when I'm not doing 
messages for them, I do a bit of window-cleanin'. 

I saw it in a book. I 
was cleanin' the windows 
of a school. Itwaslyin' 
on a desk. Now I'm 
always sharp on them 
things. I'd sooner read 
a book like that than 
any novel. Lairs and 
Penaits — I saw it there 
in the book." 

" But which means 
household gods?" said 




I — "Lairs or Penaits?" 

" Well, both of them. Only, 
one's old Roman Latin, and the 
other's Italian Latin." 

I looked at him with envy. 
" I wish I was educated like 
you," said I. 
" Well, you can't 'elp it 'ere in Oxford," said he. 
" I say it's the air of the place — it makes you want 
to know things like that." 

" And such a help to window-cleaning," said I. 
He glanced at me quickly. 

"Ye — es," said he — but oh! so very slowly! It 
might have been a word of two syllables. 



VI 
JOSEPH PHIPKIN— OWNER 

DOWN by the canal wharf, I found the Flower 
| of Gloster. What with her new paint, the 
thought too, no doubt, that soon she would 
be mine, I could have picked her out from 
a thousand others. Their ideas of colour are very 
southern, these people of the barges. Much is to be 
found of the gypsy in their habits, their appearance, 
and their minds. Indeed, they are no less than water 
gypsies, having that same barbaric, Latin eye for 
colour with the painting of their boats as the country 
gypsy has for the decoration of his caravan. 

The exterior of the cabin in the aft part of the 
boat is gaily painted with vivid reds, glaring yellows, 
greens, and black. Water-cans, buckets, the shallow 
pails for the horse's provender, even the horse's traces 
too — a set of wooden beads strung loose upon a 
cord — all are painted with their Spanish joy of 
colour. And this is not the closest relation of their 
minds to that country which has fed the world with 
gypsies. I puzzled for a long while before I realised 

25 



26 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



that the scenes which are painted on the panels on 
their cabin exteriors are rough pictures of those 
castles, not which you build, but whfch you find in 
Spain. What is more, these people are lovers of 
brass — a sure sign of the gypsy. Inside many a 




cabin of the boats which ply their long journeys and 
are the only homes of those who work them, you 
will find the old brass candlesticks, brass pots and 
pans, all brilliantly polished, glittering in the light. 
A brass lamp hangs from the bulkhead. It does not 
swing, for the motion of these barges is like to no 
other vehicle in which I have ever ridden. It is no 
motion, or it is motion asleep. 



JOSEPH PHIPKIN— OWNER 27 

It was when I had put myself in the way of a 
bargain with Joseph Phipkin, owner of the Flower of 
Gloster, that I ventured to lead the conversation back 
to where my thoughts of gypsies were still waiting. 

There is no frame of mind so conducive to an 
amicable interchange of ideas as when two men have 
settled a matter of purchase to their liking. Both 
are warm with the virtue of having given, both 
secretly with joy in that they have received. Had 
it left but a shirt to my back for the journey, I 
should not have grudged Mr. Phipkin the price he 
had asked for the Flower of Gloster. And had I 
broken her nose against the first bridge I met, then, 
thinking of the price he had received, doubtless he 
would have been philosophical. There was no such 
thing as a treaty between us. The money left my 
pocket with that ease and familiarity with which 
money always treats me. Judging by the way his 
fingers closed upon it, it found its way into his purse 
in much the same manner. There are men who 
spend money in this world; there are men who 
receive it; and the two are always coming together 
over the question of a bargain. Business would be a 
more ugly affair than it is if such were not the case. 

" And, now that's settled," said I, " where am 
I to look for a man? I want a man and a horse." 

" Are yer particular? " he asked. 

" Needs must," said I ; " not only to the devil's 
driving." 



28 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

He let that pass, still waiting for my answer. 

" I shall get more to the manner of the thing," 
thought I, " as I go along. The sooner I am out- 
side Oxford, the better." The fact of the matter 
was, that window-cleaner had upset all my balance of 
men and things. 

" I'm particular," I went on, " that he's kind to 
his beast. Nothing else worries me." 

" Well, sir, they're all that," said he, " a man 
don't quarrel with his bread and butter, 'less it ain't 
cut to his liking." 

" I'd sooner have your observation," said I, " than 
half the learning in Oxford." And that being the 
kind of remark one makes to a man when one is in 
a good humour with the world in general, he took 
every syllable of it to swell himself with pride. 

" 'Taint no good," said he seriously, " going 
about this world with yer eyes shut. What I say is, 
if a man has to be thrown amongst men it's no waste 
of time if he tries to understand 'em. 

" It's a policy," said I, " that applies not only to 
men." 

" I'd do the same with wild beasts," he replied. 

" And even there," said I, " it might be to your 
advantage." 

" I can well believe it," he returned seriously, 
for I had but to say a thing with a straight face and 
he took me promptly at my word. " But about 
this man," he continued. " What yer want is some 



JOSEPH PHIPKIN— OWNER 29 

decent fellar with a horse, what'll look after yer goin' 
through the locks. That's how I take it." 

I complimented him on the gift he had of a ready 
understanding. 

" Well," said he, " I've no time to waste puzzlin' 
out what people mean. If my understandin' ain't 
good enough to take their meanin' first go-off, it's 
no good my doin' business with 'em. Now the man 
yer want is Eynsham Harry. He's not working 
just now — won't be for more than a month. But 
he knows the canals blindfold — been a-boatin' all his 
life. Born on a barge — he'll die on a barge, too. 
He's a dark-lookin' fellar; but you'll find all these 
people are dark — dark hair, dark eyes, that browny 
sort of skin, winter and summer. It ain't the sun." 

Now, this was just the point for which I had been 
waiting; for whatever may be written of places, their 
greater interest is the people who inhabit them. So 
you make a home, by those who dwell in it. When, 
then, he spoke of their complexion, I let him go no 
further. 

" Has the bargee any definite origin? " I inquired. 
" Does any one know where he comes from?" 

He shook his head. He shook it wisely, as 
though much were to be said upon a matter to 
which as yet he had not given the fulness of his 
attention. 

" They're not like ordinary people, anyhow," said 
he — " I've studied them here and there, and I've 



30 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

noticed that. They're all dark — a brown-eyed lot, 
I call 'em. Yer see, they never 'malgamate. They 
fruitify amongst themselves." 

" Of course, if they do that " said I. 

" Well, that's the way I understand it," he 
replied. 

Now, I would not have disturbed his under- 
standing for the world, and, so far as it confirmed 
my ideas about the water gypsy, I was constrained 
to be satisfied. Undoubtedly they are of Southern 
extraction. Their dark, black hair, their olive skin, 
that soft expression of lethargy in the eyes, all point 
to the blood of some race other than the fair-haired 
Saxon. Perhaps vagabondage is in the blood and 
these are the outward and visible signs of a grace 
that I for one would not be sorry to count amongst 
my virtues, always supposing I were able to talk in 
the plural about such matters. 

There was one thing more, however, upon which 
I needed enlightenment. The name of the man 
he had recommended had a touch of the uncommon 
about it. I asked him if it were a nickname. 

" Not exactly," he replied. " The men are named 
here by the places they hail from. What his real 
name is, I don't know. He's probably forgotten it 
himself by this time. Harry's his name, and he 
comes from Eynsham." 

"And where shall we find him?" said I. 

With a throw of his head in its direction, Mr. 



JOSEPH PHIPKIN— OWNER 31 

Phipkin indicated a public-house called the Nag's 
Head. 

" If yer ever want a bargee in Oxford," said he, 
" look for him there." 

And without doubt this was the soundest piece 
of information Mr. Phipkin had yet given me. 




VII 

THE BARGAIN 
—OXFORD 



OVER an affair of this nature, when the ques- 
tion of payment is invariably left to so 
much of a sense of honour as you care to 
lay claim to, it is as well to open the pro- 
ceedings as far from the matter in hand as possible. 

In reply to my suggestion, the landlord brought 
in whisky and water to the little parlour of the Nag's 
Head, where I have no doubt private transactions 
have taken place ever since the canals were opened. 
It is an old inn. The floors are strewn with sawdust. 
The benches are well-worn and polished. Through 
the door from the bar comes the sound of thick 

32 



THE BARGAIN— OXFORD 33 

laughter, heavy voices, and the brittle clink of glasses. 
One glance within reminded me of the drinking- 
houses along the quay-side in Marseilles. In a 
shadow three men were playing cards with a pack 
whose nearly every feature had been defaced by the 
grimy hands through which they had passed. In the 
corners, men stood in groups and talked. Every 
man talked. No man listened. But this always 
happens where men are gathered together for the sole 
purpose of drinking. 

In our little parlour it was just the reverse. 
Each one of us wanted to listen while the other 
talked, for a man scents business no less readily than 
he does danger. A certain flavour of it is set free 
from the situation; and, have you but the slightest 
sensitiveness to such things, you must get wind of it 
at once. When, therefore, such a case arises, it is wise 
to say as little as possible. 

Now of all the men I have ever met who were 
keen to the susceptibility of such a moment, Eynsham 
Harry was the most acute. With a slow but steady 
eye upon Mr. Phipkin, he listened attentively while 
that gentleman portentously explained the meaning of 
my presence in the parlour of the Nag's Head. 

" Harry," said he, " this gentleman has taken the 
Flower of Gloster for a month. He's goin' to do a 
trip over the canals." 

Eynsham Harry nodded his head in silence, and 
for a moment his eyes met mine, though they quickly 



34 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

fell again as though, under the circumstances, I might 
be sensitive to his scrutiny. 

" I'm on some fool's errand," thought I, " and 
the man is sorry for me. But in this world such 
things may easily happen without one being sorry for 
oneself. 1 ' His glance in no way disconcerted me, and, 
after it, we drank our whisky for a moment without 
speaking. Had it been a meeting of the Council of 
Ten, we could scarcely have been more serious over it. 

Presently Mr. Phipkin broke in again. 

" This gentleman wants a man and a horse, 
Harry," said he — " do you think we could find 
'em?" 

The point of the matter was now coming home 
to him. I wanted a man and a horse. Obviously 
he was the man. He had a horse as well, and for 
the next month was doing nothing; whereupon he 
became more cautious than ever. 

" I've no doubt," he replied at length. " Does 
the gentleman want to find 'en in Oxford?" 

" I want to start away to-day," said I. 

He shifted his cap and scratched his head. 

"How about Jack Leamington?" asked Mr. 
Phipkin, and, under cover of his glass, he dropped a 
wink to me. 

"Jack's all right," Eynsham Harry replied; "but 
I don't know what the gentleman wants to pay." 

"A pound a week," said I; "I'll find the man's 
food — the horse's too." 



THE BARGAIN— OXFORD 35 

Mr. Phipkin looked at him as one who would 
say, " Now's yer chance!" But in the light of 
things as I see them now, this was only a stage in the 
business which, for myself, I would gladly have com- 
pleted long ago. But I find they like these methods. 
It is the one thing British about them. If a deal 
is to be made, there is always joy in the heart of them 
over the odd penny that remaineth. That glance of 
Mr. Phipkin's was merely to assure me that he was 
acting wholly and entirely in my interests. Eynsham 
Harry took no notice of it. 

"Jack Leamington," said he, "would want 
nearer two." 

" Well," I asked, " supposing you were able to 
come, what would you want? " 

He looked surprised. You would never have 
supposed it could have entered his head that I might 
suggest such a thing. 

" Well, sur," said he, " I should leave that to 
you." And by the tone in his voice it was under- 
stood that not only was I a man of honour, but of no 
little generosity beside. 

Now by this I had had enough of bargaining and, 
when you get into that frame of mind, it goes hard 
with you if you don't get what you want. For, I 
take it, in a bargain, one man at least desires to effect 
an exchange; and the other, if he cares little what 
happens, is in far the better position of the two. 

" I'll give you thirty shillings," said I, and, 



^ 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



swallowing the rest of my whisky, I put down the 
glass with a rap upon the trestle table. 

For yet another moment he was silent, as though 
a thousand calculations were passing through his 
mind. But when I made a movement to be off, 
preparatory to shaking the sawdust of the place from 
off my feet, he clinched with me at once. 

" I'll take it on," said he, " for a month." 
That is the best of leaving these things to men 
of honour. They are always fools. One pound 
a week would have paid him handsomely. I notice, 
however, that there is no such thing as discount on 
the price of experience. Another time I shall know 
better. 



A/" 




VIII 
THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY 

WHEN once your provisions are aboard, 
your passes signed and paid for, there 
remains nothing but to hitch your horse 
to the tow-rope and be off. Here, on the 
canals, there is no tide to hinder any man. At such 
an hour you start, because at such an hour before 
nightfall, when all the locks are closed, you need to 
be in such and such a place. Indeed, it is the life 
of a gypsy. Your home you carry with you whereso- 
ever you go, moreover there is not one upon the road 
who may lift his hand to stay you. 

At a quarter past four that afternoon in May, I 
sat in the stern of the Flower of Gloster and watched 
the tow-line tauten, saw the water-drops shake from 
off the sodden rope that glistened like a twisted thread 
of silver in the sunlight, and felt that first faint move- 
ment of the barge as she swung round into her gentle, 
gliding pace. 

I pushed the tiller over hard a-starboard, and out 
went her nose into the canal's centre. One by one 
the ripples gathered and lengthened on the water, 

37 



38 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



and soon we were leaving the towers and roofs of the 
old grey town behind us. 

Some twenty yards ahead upon the path walked 
Eynsham Harry with his horse, the tow-line sagging 
and tautening, sagging and tautening, as she strained 
or lingered on her way. 




Once I lifted my head and looked above me. The 
sky was just beginning to tinge with primrose. 

" Now, were I in London," said I, " my ears 
would be filled with the shrieks of a thousand motor 
horns and I could scarcely see the sky for the 
housetops. What is more, I'm going into a new 
world where never a soul will trouble to tell me 
the way." 

And then, as though to make the silence more 
absolute and complete, a peewit rose and swept in 



THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY 39 



^!C 



circles round the meadows. " Pee- 
wit! " she cried; "pee-wit!" 

" It is little sounds," thought I, 
" that fill the silences." 

For silence is a vessel that may be 
filled, or may be broken. Now in 
London we have nothing save the 
shattered fragments, which not even the long sleep 
of a winter's night can mend. But in the country, 
the song of a lark will fill the pitcher to the brim. 
Add but the notes of a thrush, and I have known 
it running over. 



\sM.\ Aft? i 







,*T 



IX 
JOHN AIKIN AND ANNA LMTITIA 

THE first canal to be opened in England was 
that in 1761, called after the Duke of 
Bridgewater. Since then, over 14,000 miles 
of navigable waterways have been brought 
into service in England and Wales, and scarce a soul 
is there, but those who work upon them, to know 
anything of these broad and often beautiful roads — 
great highways into the heart of the most glorious 
country in the world. 

" 'Tis obvious," said I, when I had read this 
paragraph again, " that an Englishman has written 
here. But if his country be not the most beautiful 
in the world to him, then it goes hard with a man 
to find beauty anywhere." 

Those peasants in the wild mountain villages 
of Switzerland would doubtless find too much of 
Nature's gentleness in the long, low stretches of open 
country that lie across our land. But if Nature has 
been gentle with you, then gentleness is her greatest 
beauty in your eyes. For myself, I know I would 
sooner have the sweep of the open meadows, the 

40 



JOHN AIKIN AND ANNA LiETITIA 41 

tinkling music of the running streams and the song 
of a soaring lark, than all the grandest range of 
mountains in Europe. But then I am not a Swiss, 
and Nature herself has looked to it in the selection of 
my parents that I should appreciate what she has 
seen fit to give me. 

Let that be as it may, I would not for a kingdom 
have missed those few weeks in the heart of England, 
far distant from any of those main thoroughfares 
where the dust of motors powders the face of Nature 
till she is worse than some painted thing. Scarce a 
soul is to be met along those winding tow-paths, for 
you may be sure that where a canal runs from one 
town to another, that is the longest way it is possible 
to go. Why, between Banbury and Napton Bottom 
there stands the little village of Wormleighton — a 
crown of old red houses upon the crest of a high 
green hill, — which thrice and again you circle round 
before you make one mile upon your journey. Now 
this is not the road a man would take from choice, 
and miles you may go, winding and ever winding 
through the sleepy level of the meadows, with never a 
human being to bid you good-night or good-morrow. 

Such are the canals of England to-day. They 
will lead you through the quietest villages, the most 
remote of hamlets, with which, to know all the 
thousand little clusterings of people, a man might 
well spend his lifetime and learn but half of the 
country in which he lived. Indeed, men of research 



4 2 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



and patience have devoted their years to its knowl- 
edge, and at the end of threescore years and ten have 
offered to the press a scarce exhaustive study of just 
the county in which they were born. Such is good 




work for one man to do in a lifetime. And through 
these countless places, hidden in the nooks and 
crannies of England, the Flower of Gloster bore me 
gently, at her peaceful, sleepy pace. 

So long have the canals been made by now, that 
but little if any of the signs of their making remain. 
Only for their tideless waters, many of them might 
well be rivers — threads of silver on which are strung 
the brilliant emeralds of many meadows. 



JOHN AIKIN AND ANNA LiETITIA 43 

I can well believe that in the days of their incep- 
tion they must have seemed the work of Goths and 
Vandals in the land. Indeed, I find a book upon my 
shelves — the Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose of John 
Aikin, M.D., and Anna Laetitia Barbauld — in which 
these two amiable collaborators vent their united 
spleen upon what they call the evil Genius of the 
Canal. 

Published in 1792, this little book of essays ran 
into its third edition, by which I gather that John 
Aikin and his companion, Anna Laetitia, had a large 
circle of friends. I can conceive no one buying the 
book but in the cause of friendship. But good or 
bad, it was thus far interesting to me in that it wrote 
of canals at so early a date. 

It is written in the first person and represents 
the sentiments of John Aikin or Anna Laetitia — per- 
haps of both. I like, anyhow, to think that it was 
Anna Laetitia. I will tell you later why. She de- 
scribes herself, on a pleasant evening succeeding a 
sultry summer day, as being invited by Nature to 
take a solitary walk. 

I am sure it was Anna Laetitia. 

Making her way through the fields and meadows, 
she comes to a valley where run both a " small 
meandering brook" and "the Duke of Bridgewater's 
canal." 

" The firm built side of the aqueduct suddenly 
opened " — and here I take quotation from the book 



44 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

itself — " and a gigantic form issued forth, which I 
soon discovered to be the Genius of the Canal. He 
was clad in a close garment of a russet hue. A mural 
crown, indented with battlements, surrounded his 
brow. His naked feet were discoloured with clay. 
On his shoulder he bore a huge pickaxe, and in his 
hand he held certain instruments used in surveying 
and levelling." 

Perhaps, after all, it was John Aikin. 

This description, however, serves to show you 
the Genius of the Canal — a spirit with thoughtful 
looks and features harsh. The Deity of the Stream 
rises from the brook to meet him. Now, the Deity 
of the Stream is habited in a light green mantle — 
" the clear drops fell from his dark hair, which was 
encircled with a wreath of water-lily, interwoven 
with sweet scented flag." 

With a contemptuous look and in a hoarse voice, 
the Genius of the Canal addresses the Brook in stern 
and opprobrious terms. 

"Hence, ignoble rill!" he begins, after which 
it were not courteous to the imagination to quote 
the rest. Such a beginning can come to no good 
end. Concluding, he demands the homage — " due 
from sloth and obscurity to grandeur and utility." 

To which the Brook replies in gentle accents: 

" I readily acknowledge the superior magnificence 
and more extensive utility of which you so proudly 
boast; yet, in my humble walk, I am not void of 



JOHN AIKIN AND ANNA LiETITIA 4 5 

a praise, less shining, but not less solid than yours. 
The nymph of this peaceful valley, rendered more 
fertile and beautiful by my stream; the neighbouring 
sylvan deities, to whose pleasure I contribute, will 
pay a grateful testimony to my merit." 

Oh, surely it must have been Anna Laetitia. I 
cannot conceive of John Aikin writing this. He 
was of too coarse a mould. 

Whichever of the two it was, a strange note 
of prophecy is struck in the end on the Brook's 
reply. 

"And when thy glories, proud Genius!" — so it 
runs — " are lost and forgotten ; when the flood of 
commerce, which now supplies thy urn, is turned 
into another course and has left thy channel dry 
and desolate, the softly flowing Avon shall still 
murmur in song, and his banks receive the hom- 
age of all who are beloved by Phoebus and the 
Muses." 

At a time when railways were not even dreamed 
of, this was indeed prophetic. But desolate though 
the Thames and Severn Canal now may be, it has 
such beauties as I shall ever remember. Were Anna 
Laetitia to stand at the topmost lock of the Golden 
Valley, where the Sapperton Tunnel pierces its dark 
way into the very heart of the hills, were she to 
stand there to-day and look down that wonderful 
valley of glorious gold, where in the month of May 
the deep woods have laid down their royal carpet 



46 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

of blue-bells, she must indeed retract all of that little 
miscellaneous piece of prose she wrote one day, a 
century ago, when John Aikin perhaps had gone 
abroad to attend a burial, and Nature had given her 
gentle invitation to the fields. 



X 



WHY I WOULD LIKE IT TO HAVE 
BEEN ANNA LMTITIA 






^ 






HIS is why I would like it to have been 
Anna Laetitia. One makes pictures in 
one's mind; one 
makes them 

often from the books one 

reads. Most vividly there 

live in my sight the places 

and the people in the 

Arabian Nights. No 

artist, however skilful, 

could ever change my 

view of them. I know 

Herr Teufelsdroeckh as 

well as I know my own 

father. I should recognise 

both as readily in the street. But it is the same with 

every single one of us. We all have our mental 

pictures, and the reality can never utterly thrust them 

from our minds. 

Now, my picture of Anna Laetitia was not con- 

47 




4 8 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

ceived in my own brain. It was made for me; 
and if it was John Aikin who wrote the apologia, 
then I am all at fault and my picture is not true. 
But I want it to be true. It amuses me to think it 
is. And this is the picture — a little triolet, by Frances 
Cornford. 

" O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, 
Missing so much and so much? 
O fat white woman whom nobody loves, 
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, 
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves 
And shivering sweet to the touch? 
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, 
Missing so much and so much?" 

I am quite sure it must have been Anna Laetitia. 
And when Nature invited her to take a solitary walk, 
she put on her best white cambric, her black gloves, 
and off she went. 

Why, of course it must have been Anna Laetitia! 



XI 
SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 

THROUGH Port Meadow the canal winds 
out of Oxford and, until you be past Wol- 
vercote Bridge and Lock, there is little but 
the sight of those suburbs which are grow- 
ing like some unsightly fungus around the larger 
towns of England. That people now, and more and 
more, should live outside the towns in which their 
business lies, is in no way to be regretted, but that the 
property should fall into the hands of those jerry- 
builders — men of execrable taste, whose only thought 
is to build for the profit it will bring them in a life- 
time — this, surely, is a matter for considerable remedy. 

With infinite care and trouble we preserve our old 
buildings; why not with equal care regard our new? 

The fact of the matter is, this is the age of 
the individualist. A man no longer builds a good 
house that it may be a pleasant home for his children 
and his children's children after him. He makes a 
dwelling which shall serve as profit to himself for 
just as long as he lives. And it is this instinct of 
the individualist which, amongst other things, brings 

49 



5 o THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

about the cheap ornate style of architecture. A man 
builds a house to catch the vulgar eye. But in days 
gone past they built simply, because they would 
build well. A castellated turret is no fit design for a 
house with a rent of forty pounds a year. At such 
a price no castellations could be made to withstand 
the destructive power of time. But with a castellated 
turret, a residence will twice as soon be let, and so 
the best and simplest of labour is thrown away upon 
these abominable appurtenances which only degrade 
the taste of those who see and live in them. 

I remember well, one Mr. , a jerry-builder 

in one of the suburbs of London. He threw up 
rows of villas in a night, as you build a house of cards 
upon a nursery table. One day I visited him, and 
was shown into the drawing-room of his own villa — 
the last and most ornate of a long and vulgar row. 

It was papered in a bright and bilious yellow. 
The chairs were upholstered in plush of rich maroon 
—a green cloth was upon one table, while on another 
stood a palm in a pot bound round with scarlet 
crinkled paper. To complete the last expression of 
his taste, there was in one corner a drain-pipe of a 
sky-blue glaze supporting another palm, and promi- 
nently upon the yellow walls were two photographs — 
enlarged to life-size — of himself and his wife. With- 
out one colour of exaggeration, this was and is the 
home of the jerry-builder — the man who caters for 
the individualist. 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 5 1 

" You're very comfortable here," said I, as he came 
into the room, his hat pitched back upon his head. 

"'Ere?" said he; "well, we don't use this room 
much 'cept Sundays, when my daughter plays to us 
a bit on the pianner. It's too nice to use reelly, 
yer know." 

" I should feel inclined myself," said I, " to keep 
the door locked on it always." 

" I know what yer mean," he replied, " it is too 
good for everyday use; but after all, if yer can afford 
to buy nice things, I don't see why yer shouldn't be 
able to enjoy 'em. Nice wallpaper, ain't it? I can 
let yer 'ave some of that at " — he paused, doubtless 
to put on the halfpenny — " at one and ninepence 
ha'penny the piece." 

"That's marvellous!" I exclaimed. 

"What — the price?" 

" No," said I, " the paper." 

He said he knew I had good taste, and that was 
why he had offered it to me. 

Now this is the man who has had the greatness 
thrust upon him of making modern architecture. 
The fire of London rid us of the plague. What a 
range of conflagration should we need to rid us of 
the jerry-builder! 

Until you make Wolvercote, then, you will see 
his handiwork at every turn of the canal; but after 
that comes the rich broad country. Then the 
willows begin to draw down to the water's edge, 



52 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 



bending and stooping like thirsty cattle to drink their 
fill. Their twisted fantastic roots dip deep into the 
cool water. I never wonder when I see a group of 
willows that Arthur Rackham should find them to 




shape into a thousand fairies and dryads. Indeed, 
there is a personality in every tree — a giant in the 
oak, a ploughman in the elm, a princess in the poplar, 
a knight-errant with his plume and armour in the 
pine; but the pollard willow, she is the home of the 
water sprite, the dryad and the nymph. Every branch 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 53 

is a fairy's arm with tapering fingers, playing strange 
music on the pipes of the wind. 

For the first hour or so out of Oxford, I thought 
surely I had come on a fool's errand. 

" My God," said I to myself in despair, " Anna 
Laetitia was right!" and, putting both hands to my 
mouth, I called out to Eynsham Harry. 
" Is it like this all the way? " I cried. 

He left his horse. She stopped at once to nibble 
by the hedge. 

"Is the canal like this all the way?" I asked 
him as he came back along the path. 

" Oh no, sur," said he: "look you, there's fine 
country soon as you come past Thrupp." 

"And where shall we stop for the night?" 

" Well, that's as it likes you, sur. We reach 
Shipton Church 'bout seven this evening. There 
be a good flow of water under, and we shall make 
Shipton Church 'bout seven." 

" Right away, then," said I. " Go along as fast 
as you can till we get away from these damned red 
brick villas." 

By which you may see I was mildly endeavouring 
to live up to the reputation of the bargee — a reputa- 
tion for strong language which, so long as I have 
known him, he has utterly failed to fulfil. 

" I suppose you like the old houses best? " said 
Eynsham Harry as he moved away. 

"I do," said I: "don't you?" 



54 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" Well, sur," he replied, " I don't know that it 
has much to do wi' me, anyway. I couldn't stop in 
a house, look you; I should catch cold the first night. 
'Tis the same wi' any of us used to living on the 
boats. I haven't slept out of a boat since I was born." 

Indeed, I can well understand it. These small 
cabins on the barges are as snug as they can be. 
A panel of one wall lets down, meeting across to 
the other side, and there is your bed as comfortable 
as that in many an hotel. When swung up again, 
the cabin is easily capacious enough for two, though 
often with these families it will accommodate 
more. In the same fashion as the bed, the door of 
a cupboard lets down to form a table. At the 
foot of the cabin steps, with chimney protruding 
through the roof, a small stove provides all that is 
necessary for warmth and cooking. Not an inch of 
the space is wasted. There are cupboards everywhere 
for clothes, crockery, and everything you need. 

As I took the tiller again and we swung off 
once more into the centre of the road, I heard, 
the old clock ticking softly in the cabin below me. 
At that moment the birds of one accord had ceased 
their singing, and except for the even, monotonous 
stepping of Eynsham Harry's horse, this was the 
only sound in all the stillness. 

At Thrupp we came to the first of those draw- 
bridges which the mere weight of a man will raise 
to let the barge pass through. At first I thought 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 



ss 



Eynsham Harry would never be there in time to swing 
her up for the barge's passage. But they know 
to a moment, these men — as well, indeed, they should 
— how long it takes. Not one instant, neither too 
soon nor too late, did he leave the horse's head. 
With sagging tow-line she walked calmly on, crossing 
the bridge after him to the tow-path on the other 
side. Then, almost as the nose of the Flower of 
Gloster passed into the shadow, he had caught hold 




of the big arms, lifted himself off his feet, and up 
swung the bridge like a feather lifted on the wind. 

These bridges are characteristic of Oxfordshire. 
You meet with them in no other county than this. 
They join, as often as not, the low-lying meadows 
which the canal intersects, and are mostly set down 
with their great arms stretching upward to admit of 
the access of cattle from one field to another. 

Immediately after passing that at Thrupp, where 
there is a little cluster of old Oxfordshire cottages 



56 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



and a farm, the canal takes a sudden, almost rect- 
angular turn. Here it leads in a straight reach down 
to the church of Shipton village, which stands upon 
the river Cherwell. 

In reality the canal is nearer to the village than 
the river; but in the days when Shipton-on-Cherwell 
received its name, they knew of no canal, nor dreamed 
of its existence. 

It was here, in the long rushes that grow under the 
broad elm trees, that we moored the Flower of Gloster, 
and Eynsham Harry took the horse over the bridge 
up into the village to find her stabling for the night. 




XII 
SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL— continued 

IN the vale of the Cherwell lies the little village 
of Shipton, the first hamlet of interest you will 
come to out of Oxford. The graveyard of the 
church rises from the canal's edge, and at the 
top of the high mound — a hill it were foolish to call 
it — stands the church with its square Norman tower 
under the deep shadows of thick elms. 

There I spent the first evening of my journey, 
and for many a year shall remember it. It had been 
one of those long hot days in May when the sun in 
a blue heaven has warmed the ground and all the 
water beneath its rays. A hatch of fly had come out 
upon the canal and, as the sun set, while Eynsham 
Harry was away in the village, I seated myself on 
the cabin roof of the Flower of Gloster, watching the 
low-flying swallows feed from the surface of the 
water. 

Up from the bridge, down to the corner, they 
sped and back again. Their flight was like that of 
some arrow with steel-blue head, shot low from its 
cross-bow. Dipping on the surface, they rose again, 

57 




Shipton-on-Cherwell. 



\ 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 59 

leaving faint ripples that spread into ever-widening 
circles as they melted into the smoothness of the 
water once more. Just as this, might an arrow 
ricochet off the water in its flight. Then, as they 
swerved upwards to the turn, I caught the swift 
warm gleam of pink upon their throats. As swiftly 
it vanished when they dipped again and flashed by 
me once more. 

Someone told me the other day that the modern 
aeronaut finds much to criticise in the flight of a 
swallow. 

" With that construction," says he, " the swallow 
should not be able to fly as easily as she does." 

I have no doubt that this may be so. It is con- 
ceivable that, built as she is, the swallow should by 
no right fly so beautifully. But if aeroplanes be the 
proper method of flying, then I know as little of 
aeronautics as must God have done when first He 
made the swallow. One day, perhaps, I shall meet 
the flautist who will tell me that the white-throat 
which sang to me all that evening in an elder tree 
upon the other bank has no conception as to how to 
produce his notes. And doubtless he will be perfectly 
right as well. We know so much nowadays ; so 
much more than ever we did. Look at my window- 
cleaner at Oxford! I am sure that Lairs and Penaits 
was not the full extent of his knowledge of the 
dead languages. In fact, I should think the only 
thing he did not know in this world was how to 



60 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

clean a window. And you can rub along quite 
easily without this accomplishment — especially if it 
be your trade. 

I am content, however, with the flight of a 
swallow. I even approve of those few unvaried 
notes of the white-throat which over and over again 
she sang to me that evening from her elder tree. 

It must have been well-nigh an hour I sat there 
before Eynsham Harry returned. And if I sat quite 
still, the wagtails came fearlessly down from the 
bridge under which they were a-building. They 
were more busy than I have ever been in my life. 
I thought that then — what amazing industry there is 
in all Nature! It is only man who, having measured 
out Time upon the dial of a clock, knows how to 
waste it; and I rather suspect that that invention 
of the chronometer has been his downfall. The 
moment he discovered that he could divide a day 
into hours, he began to temporise, and the first 
clock that rang its chime heralded the birth of 
procrastination. It is this way, with his endless 
wisdom, that a man is always making his own 
Frankenstein. 

But in the animal world there is no other time- 
keeper than Necessity. Now, you cannot temporise 
with that. That is why the wagtails worked so 
hard, stepping swiftly with their dainty feet over the 
light surface of the mud. That is why the swallows 
never ceased their flying to and fro the canal. 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 6 1 

When I thought of it — all that day they had been 
upon the wing! Such tireless labour, if he could 
but achieve it, might make the threescore years and 
ten of a man more worthy of its record when his day 
had reached its end. 

" I am tired," some man caused to be written 
for his epitaph — " I am tired of all this buttoning and 
unbuttoning." 

That he should have unbuttoned at last to so 
good a purpose as that truthful jest, excuses him of 
much of the time he wasted. But there are many 
of us who button and unbutton every day with no 
greater purpose to ourselves and others as just serves 
to keep us in the bounds of decency. But what is a 
day of decency to one hour slipped away? The 
swallow obeys that Nature which has been given him 
and earns no criticism from any one of us. Why, 
even on the canals, where circumstance makes no 
allowance for it, the ordinary so-called laws of 
decency are held in no regard. And no sense of yours 
is violated then. 

I spoke of this matter one day to Eynsham Harry 
— I spoke of it with some reserve, yet spoke of it 
because I wished to know. 

" What do the women of the barge do in such 
cases," I asked, " when you are miles from any cot- 
tage or place of habitation? " 

"Do?" said he. " Why, look you, sur — that 
hedge which runs along by every tow-path. If 



62 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



Nature couldn't grow enough leaves on that hedge 
to hide a sparrow's nest, it ain't no good to God, man, 
nor beast." 

I wanted no better answer than that. Where 
there is Nature there are no laws of decency. Not 
only to the physiologist, but to Nature too, all things 
are pure. 








W v I 



i 



XIII 
SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL— continued 

SEEING that one of these fine days I must lie 
buried somewhere, and it being best to speak 
of such things while one has a voice in the 
matter, then of all places let me lie under the 
shadow of the elms in Shipton churchyard. 

It rises in a sudden slope from the canal's edge 
and surrounds the church on the crest of the mound. 
In the early part of May, when first I visited it, the 
high, thick grass was dotted with cuckoo flowers from 
the midst of which the moss-grown grave-stones just 
rose in unobtrusive memory of those who lay beneath. 
Nearly all the raised mounds of earth, often so sadly 
reminiscent of the shapes of the bodies they cover, 
were concealed in the long grass; but where one was 
exposed, there lifted the scarlet head of a tulip as 
though to prove how full of life is that acre which 
belongs to God. 

When I returned in the last week of the month 
it was all changed. From the plain, pink muslin of 
her cuckoo flower, spring had put on her gorgeous 
lace blossoms of heracleum. The whole place was 

63 





■S '^* ; 



&",•• 



v- 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 6s 

white and feathered with their blooms. Scarcely 
above them, then, rose the silent heads of the grave- 
stones. Often you must push the blossoms aside to 
read the names of those who lay beneath. And above 
it all, like a sentinel guarding the peace of those good 
country folk who slept there, the tower of the old 
Norman church rose out of the thick branches of the 
elms and faced the sky. 

When the night comes for me to rest, 
Let me lie down in the long green grass. 
I need no garden with fine flowers dressed 
When the night comes for me to rest; 
Where Nature sows I shall sleep best, 
And where God reaps no place surpass. 
When the night comes for me to rest, 
Let me lie down in the long green grass. 

At Shipton House, which stands just next to and 
above the churchyard, they told me that once King 
John had had his garden. Dr. Yule, who lies buried 
in a vault beside the church, has no doubt written of 
this in the papers he compiled concerning the history 
of Shipton. I called at the vicarage there, in the 
hope of being allowed to see them, but the vicar was at 
Oxford for the day, and, writing later, he was 
possibly still away in Oxford, for I received no reply. 
In any case, it is not wise to let valuable papers out 
of one's hands, and that to the first vagabond who 
happens to come along. 

As I walked up the drive to the vicarage door, 



66 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

there were some jolly children playing on the lawn 
white with daisies. A little dog left his frolicking 
with them and came to tell me that I was nothing 
less than an intruder. 

" Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, 
The beggars are coming to Town." 

That little nursery rhyme ran inevitably in my 
head as I rang the bell. Of course, the vicar was 
quite right not to answer my letter. 

But if he had, I might have written more of the 
history of Shipton, of which I am assured there is no 
little to be told. And yet, this is no guide-book, so 
perhaps it is as well without. I only loved the place 
as I saw it with its elm trees and its cow-parsnips — 
the old Roman cross that stands solitary in the grave- 
yard, and all those wild flowers of the field which 
combine to make it one of the most restful spots I 
have ever seen. 

For some hours that night I lay awake listening 
to the great silence. No doubt it was the first 
strangeness of that bed in the cabin of the Flower of 
Gloster which kept me from sleeping. But it was a 
rest to lie there, nevertheless. Through the open door- 
way of the cabin the stars were glittering in a deep- 
blue sky, and now and then a bird chirped sleepily 
as its mate pressed close against it on the branch. 

" A man might do worse," thought I, " than 



SHIPTON-ON-CHERWELL 



67 



spend his life like this." But when I began to con- 
sider how it might be done, I fell asleep. 

The next morning we started at five. I was 
sitting on the roof of the cabin eating my breakfast 
as we passed through Heyford Lock. 




XIV 

SOMERTON 

jA LL that day we wound through the meadows. 

/% The cattle came down to the water's edge 

/ % to look at us as we passed. They are shy, 

curious things, young heifers. The world is 

very new to them. In their soft eyes is all that patient 

wonder of the child. So near did we pass them at 




times that, had I swung the tiller round, I might have 
touched their noses with my hand. 

So the day slips, just as the meadows pass, in that 
silent, gliding way whereby it is gone before you 
have thought to count an hour of it. Only now and 
again is the pleasant monotony of it broken by the 

68 



SOMERTON 69 

commotion of a passing barge. Then there is crack- 
ing of whips, the raising of voices, the soft scraping 
purr as the boat runs by you, touching your side. 
Scraps of conversation are exchanged ere they shoot 
out of distance and, turning some sudden corner, are 
lost to sight. For a long while before, you may often 
hear them coming. Where there is none to lead the 
horse, a man will sit at the tiller with his whip, 
cracking it ever and again as the gentle beast lingers 
to nibble from the hedge. Nearer grows that sound 
and nearer, until the smoking funnel from the cabin 
fire can just be seen above the hedgerows. Then 
round she swings into sight — a Fellows Morton with 
a load of straw, a pair of Falkeners with cargoes of 
best bright, or a Shropshire Union with her odorous 
merchandise of gas-water. 

Sometimes perhaps it is a fly-boat out of Birming- 
ham, travelling her steady three miles an hour, day 
and night, like the old express coaches of a time that 
few of us are now left to remember. One and all 
they know each other's journeys, as sailors will tell 
you in mid-ocean the destination of some passing 
vessel; as ships, too, they will hail each other in 
passing while the tow-lines swing across. 

" Good morning, Joseph! " 

"Good morning, Harry!" 

" If 'ee see Sam in Oxford, tell 'en I've got that 
there horse for 'en whenever he wants to see 'er." 

And then no doubt may follow little scraps of 



70 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



canal gossip in voices rising as the distance increases 
between them. For never do they loiter. Time is 
a precious matter with them, and with them also 
necessity is their chronometer. They are like the 
wagtails. Often I envied them the hours they spent 
a-working. 

At Somerton that second day, I had lunch at a 

little inn by the canal 
side; indeed I might 
loiter as I chose. It 
was while the good lady 
was making ready — the 
boiled eggs, the glass of 
beer, the piece of cheese 
— that I strolled up into 
the village with its grey 
stone cottages and neat, 
trim gardens. A Norman church is here as well. Eyn- 
sham Harry came with me, and together we secured 
the keys. A youth of twelve, of a suspicious turn of 
mind, was deputed to carry them and accompany us. 
For a moment I stood looking at the Tower 
before we entered. 

" Nine hundred years odd seems very little when 
you look at that," said I. 

Eynsham Harry stood and stared at it. 
" Is it nine hundred years since that was built? " 
he asked presently. 

" It is indeed," said I — " there or thereabouts." 




SOMERTON 71 

" Well," he added after a pause — " I 'old wi' 
churches in their proper place." 

But what he meant by it, I cannot attempt to say. 

By this time the boy was waiting at the door, and 
in we went, whereupon the boy followed us closely, 
watching all we did. I fancy he was more deeply 
suspicious of me. I think, moreover, he was right. 
With a rich and a poor man, I would always mis- 
trust the rich. There is only one reason why a poor 
man steals — the pain of extreme need. 

Beyond that, there is nothing so honest as poverty. 
Now, of the two of us, my poverty was the least 
apparent. It came, no doubt, of having a coloured 
tie, a gold watch-chain, and a crease to my trousers. 
It was not a crease that lasted for long; but this was 
only my second day. I have no doubt, however, that 
Eynsham Harry is a richer man than I am. 

When I found the youth at our heels in the 
chancel, I turned on him. 

"What are you afraid we'll steal?" I asked. 

" There be'ant nothin' to steal," he replied — " 'tis 
all lockit up." 

I asked him why, and he told me that two weeks 
before an old silver chalice had been stolen, by 
visitors, from the altar. I can conceive no theft 
more meanly done than this. One might never say 
a prayer in a church from one year's end to another 
and be little the worse for it; but to steal from the 
high altar — were it only a flower at harvest-time — 



72 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

must be the greatest of all deadly sins, whether it be 
included in the seven or no. 

But this guarding the stable when the horse was 
locked up somewhere else was characteristic of the 
precaution of country life. I could not help but 
smile. The boy followed our every footstep, and the 
moment we had gone out locked the door again, 
taking the coppers I gave him with a pull at his 
forelock. 

Back at the inn where we had lunch, I found a 
book, the title of which attracted me: A Book on 
Etiquette, by a Member of the Aristocracy. 

" Is it etiquette," said I, " to announce in print 
that you are a member of that much-to-be-envied 
class of people? " 

Eynsham Harry set a piece of cheese upon his 
knife and shook his head. 

"Let's see what he has to say about it": where- 
upon I opened the book and read. 

" When entertaining guests," says this member 
of the aristocracy — or it is words to this effect — " do 
not produce the family album and expect them to be 
interested in the portraits of people whom they have 
never met. Rather keep them amused and interested 
by light and chatty conversation, so that they will 
feel the time pass easily until it is the proper moment 
to take their leave." 

I wonder how many trusting people have taken 
to heart these words of a member of the aristoc- 



SOMERTON 73 

racy, putting away their splendid albums wherein 
the photo of Uncle William taken in Toronto in a 
violent thunderstorm always made everyone laugh 
who looked at it? I wonder how many dull evenings 
that member of the aristocracy is accountable for, 
when the poor hostess strives a thousand times to 
begin a light and chatty conversation and, failing 
utterly, falls to silence, yet still refrains from bring- 
ing down that leather-covered volume with its 
nickel-silver clasp? 

It is not fair when you are a member of the 
aristocracy to take such advantage of your power as 
this. There is only one thing to be done. Let 
some honest merchant in the suburbs write a book 
and call it a Book on Sincerity by a Member of the 
Democracy. Only it would never repay him, and I 
am sure that book on etiquette was a gold-mine. 



XV 

THE TRADE IN OLD BITS 

" Ride-a-cock horse 
To Banbury Cross 
To see a fine lady on a white hoss." 

INDEED you must say — hoss. There is scarce 
a child of any discrimination who would listen 
to you if you did 
not. I wonder — 
without any of that 
sentiment about it at all 
which so many people 
dislike in others and 
enjoy so much in them- 
selves — I wonder how 
many little pink fingers 
have been pinched, how many little crumpled toes 
have been pressed to the concluding lines of that 
well-worn nursery stanza? Many and many a mil- 
lion, and doubtless there will be many a million more. 
That was indeed a literary achievement to write 
but one stanza which, for so many centuries, should 

74 




THE TRADE IN OLD BITS 75 

be sung to the race which is to be; a stanza, more- 
over, bringing with it those wonderful echoes of youth 
to every grown-up man and woman who inevitably 
repeat it to themselves whenever they hear the 
name of Banbury Town. It may have been of 
political significance once. So far as I know, the real 
history of the rhyme has never been traced. But the 
women of England have found other uses for it, and 
I am sure they know best. 

We came into Banbury that evening where, leaving 
the barge to Eynsham Harry, I went up into the 
town. He needed to go no further than some public- 
house such as the Nag's Head in Oxford. There are 
always inns ready to the canal to supply the needs 
of the barges passing continually backwards and 
forwards. I left him there and hurried up into the 
town before the shops should close. 

There is little of the old aspect of Banbury left 
now. Agricultural advancement — as indeed with 
advancement of any sort — has set upon it the seal 
of the new order of things. A few of the old houses 
remain; a few of the old inns. Old arches beneath 
the houses will often invite you to stop and look 
within; but as often as not they are disappointing. 
The Reindeer Inn still has its beauties. The 
shop in Parson's Street dating at least, so I am in- 
formed, from the year 1616, still sells the famous 
cakes made from the old recipe, and still keeps the 
odour of its years about it. They even retain the 



76 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

old windows, just as they were, against all the tempt- 
ing advantages of plate-glass. 

The new cross which stands in the market-place 
was erected in 1858 to commemorate the marriage 
of the Princess Royal with the Crown Prince of 
Prussia. I do not think it pretends in any way to be 
a copy of the old, or even to occupy the original site. 
It is two centuries and a half ago since the Puritans 
destroyed it. I often wonder where vandalism ends 
and religious zeal begins. It must be a fine line in- 
deed that separates them. 

But were I bent upon giving a history of the 
Town of Banbury or of any other place upon the 
road, this chronicle of the Flower of Gloster had 
never been written. What happens to you upon a 
voyage of discovery is that you learn the world by 
what you see and not by what you hear. 

Indeed I saw little in Banbury, for, to tell the 
truth, the cross greatly disappointed me, and neither 
appetite nor curiosity were strong enough to persuade 
me to the cakes. Beyond these, is there anything 
in Banbury but legend and fairy-tale? There are 
numbers of windows filled with the glaring modernity 
of agricultural instruments. No doubt they have 
grown into their place in the field; they have become 
part of the soil upon which they work. The whirr of 
the reaper is now a sound that one has learnt to 
associate with those still, hot days of late summer. 
It is as natural to the ear now as the note of the corn- » 



THE TRADE IN OLD BITS 77 

crake. I would not lose it for the world. But, 
displayed as they were in the streets of Banbury, I 
felt them somehow out of place. 

As I stood and looked at them, I thought of that 
farmer in the south of Ireland, when first he brought 
the reaper and binder into his fields. He had only 
hired the machine. So delicate and intricate an 
instrument was beyond his means to buy. He had 
only hired it, and stood there in his cornfield with me 
as slowly and surely it narrowed down the swaying 
army of blades of wheat. I watched the wonder in 
his eyes as the relentless arms swept down their bur- 
den against the knives, as, load by load, they gathered 
it into sheaves, bound it and cast it from them. For 
a long while he never spoke. He watched it silently 
with a breathless interest — a conscript thrust unwill- 
ingly into the invading ranks of time. 

At last he turned to me. 

" Shure, 'tis the divil in ut! " said he. " Mind ye, 
'tis no surprise to me the way ut reaps at all, but how 
the hell does ut tie the knot in the shtring? There 
must be fingers to do ut — faith, 'twill take me all me 
time to tie a knot meself, but that damn thing does ut 
wid its eyes shut. I don't like the ways of ut at all." 

That was just what I felt when I saw the agri- 
cultural machines in Banbury; but it was the looks 
and not the ways of them I disliked. And that was 
not the only thing which spoilt my impression of 
the Town. I went into a curio shop there. Where, 



78 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

indeed, did I not go into a curio shop? In most of 
them is that inimitable atmosphere of age. The 
world has a history to it in these places; but in this 
curio shop there was none. All the brass candle- 
sticks and bed-warmers looked unreal. 

"Is this old brass?" I asked of the man who 
served me. 

" Every bit of it," he replied with confidence. 

I picked up a box, purporting to be one of those old 
candle boxes which have come to us from Flanders. 

"This old?" said I. 

" Oh — yes — oh, yes," said he—" we don't touch 
anything but old bits." 

I examined it, and found that the hinges were 
new. The solder joining it together was as fresh as 
paint; the very edges were sharp. No hands had 
ever lifted that lid when the long winter evenings 
were drawing in. No tallow candles had ever lain 
there waiting to be used. It was all redolent of the 
agricultural machine, and there was no soil of which 
it could become a part. 

" How much do you want for it? " I asked. 

" Twenty-five shillings." 

I smiled. In Birmingham where it had been 
made, probably it had cost two. Now, when he saw 
me smile, thinking too perhaps from the way I had 
examined it that I knew more than I really do, he 
made a generous, nay, a flattering offer. 

" Twenty shillings to you, sir," said he. 



THE TRADE IN OLD BITS 79 

" You know it's not old," said I. " You know 
it was made last week with seventy others in Bir- 
mingham? " 

" Had it eighteen months myself," he replied. 

I replied that it was older than I thought; but 
still I pressed my point. 

" But you know it is not really old," I persisted. 

" I believe it's made up from old brass," said he. 

I laughed. I could not help it. I laughed aloud 
at that. 

"Why — my God!" said I, "all brass is old — as 
old as the metals from which it is made, since they're 
as old as the earth they come from. Made up of 
old brass! Now, supposing I hadn't known any 
better, would you have let me purchase that believing 
it to be old? " 

"Why not?" he replied. "If you hadn't asked, 
why should I have told you? " 

" Then I take it," said I, " that your idea of the 
truth is the contradiction of a lie. You must tell 
your lie first." 

"Who's telling lies?" he demanded. 

" Well — one of us," said I, " is telling the truth. 
I shouldn't like to hurt your feelings by saying which 
of us it was." 

He followed me to the door with the old bit in 
his hand. I don't think I should care to be a trader 
in old bits. The world is so full of fools, and every 
fool is a temptation to a would-be honest man. 



XVI 
CROPREDY 

IT was after leaving Banbury that the interest of 
the journey scarcely ever faltered. Had I really 
known what travelling was until I went aboard 
the Flower of Gloster? I scarcely think so. 
The member of Parliament in the early part of the 
last century who complained that it was a tempting 
of all Providence to ride upon any vehicle exceeding 
the speed of twenty miles an hour, has all my respect, 
if so be it he was speaking of travelling. This insen- 
sate desire to get there takes all meaning from the verb 
" to travel." Indeed, in these days it would seem that 
the only effort of a man is to conquer the dimensions, 
to annihilate Space, to crush Time beneath his heel. 
For man is becoming a socialist not only in matters 
political; he would deny even the monarchy of 
Nature, dethroning that by which alone he may 
come into his kingdom. 

But in the name of Heaven, what has this to do 
with barges? Yet, if a man must travel from London 
to Birmingham in a few odd number of minutes, let 
him at least once in his life take a barge from Oxford 

80 



CROPREDY 8 1 

and do it in five days. It will teach him much, and, 
amongst other things, he may find that the dimension 
of Time is not to be conquered by beating. 

We started late out of Banbury that next morning. 
I must confess it, I lay long in bed, and not all the 
sounds of other barges slipping their lines could 
waken me. 

When at last I did get up, I gathered from 
Eynsham Harry that the other boatmen had been 
laughing at him for the strenuous labour of his 
journey. 

" They say you'd make a fine master for a fly- 
boat, sur," he told me. 

"One man's meat," said I; "but it's past belief 
that any man could find this life a poisoning, even if 
he were to travel night and day." 

" Well, sur," he replied — and here I learnt he 
had by way of a philosophy — " men have peculious 
ideas of how they shall enjoy themselves, and they 
most ways signifies what sort of men they are. 'Tis 
one man in a thousand as chooses in this world what 
he shall be, but every jack one of 'em select their 
own enjoyment. I had a week in London once, and 
there was a friend of mine what spent every evening 
going to a theatre. I've never thought properly of 
him since." 

I thought softly of the times that I had been to 
the theatre, but said no word of it. I share that, 
weakness in common with many, that at all hazards 



82 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 






I would be thought properly of. Moreover, there 
was a note in Eynsham Harry's voice which made 
me feel that, in what he said, there was a point of 
view which it might take more than logic to destroy. 
There was more than the Nonconformist conscience 
to it. I doubt, in fact, whether it were a matter of 

conscience at all, for he 
i:^ was not a man to be 

worried much by trifles. 
"Well, how," said 
I, " do you find your 
enjoyment? " 

He was taking the 
tiller, making his morn- 
ing ablutions at the 
same time, while I lay 
stretched upon the cabin 
roof. Fanny, the horse, 
was ambling quietly 
along the tow-path, just keeping the line from sag- 
ging in the water whenever I had the energy to 
crack the whip. 

Eynsham Harry dried the soap-suds out of the 
corners of his eyes before he answered me. 

" Well, sur," he replied, " as I said before, what 
I calls enjoyment another man may find little but a 
waste of time; but, look you, so long as it enjoys 
me, where's the call to fret about it? If I've got 
any time on me hands just about this season of the 




CROPREDY 83 

year, I can't do no better with myself than go bird's- 
nesting." 

I had thought of — oh! I had thought of every- 
thing but that. 

" Bird's-nesting! " said I. " Have you got a 
collection of eggs?" 

" No, sur — I had when I was a boy. When I 
was a youngster I used to think there was no sense 
in goin' a-nesting, not unless I took the eggs. I 
don't touch 'en now." 

"Why not?" 

" Well, 'tis all right in young fellers. I don't 
stop my son a-doin' it. But if he takes more than 
one egg out of a nest, I give 'en a thrashing. 'Tis 
all right with young fellers. They want some sort 
to boast about. 'Tis proper for them to have the 
feelin's of competition. But, God bless me, I don't 
mind if a man knows more about birds 'n what 
I do. All I feels is I'd be damn glad to have a talk 
wi' 'en." 

" So you get just as much amusement in finding 
the nest, though you don't touch the eggs? " 

" Every bit, sur. I came back last Sunday week, 
and I said to my boy: 'Sunny,' said I, 'I found a 
red-start's nest this morning — four eggs.' ' Where, 
dad?' says he; 'I haven't got a red-start's.' 'No, 
not in your collection,' said I, ' but I've got four in 
mine. And you won't learn nothing about the ways 
of that bird — not if I tells you where her nest is. 



8 4 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 







~& 



'Taint no sense in buyin' eggs. You find 'en, and 

then you'll know something you didn't know before.' " 

When a man makes you think, there is more than 

just something 
to him. From 
this moment to 
the end of the 
journey, I never 
regretted that 
thirty shillings a 
week which had 
been cajoled out 
of me in the 
private parlour 
of the Nag's 
Head. Had it 
been but to learn 
just this one 
characteristic of 
him, the thirty 
shillings were 
worth it. 

For some 
little while, 
then, I sat look- 
ing on ahead to where Fanny was quietly making 
her journey. Every moment she would shuffle a 
step nearer to the edge, casting a wistful glance at 
the young, green shoots of the hawthorn. Another 







CROPREDY 



: 5 



step nearer, and at the crack of my whip she 
would fall back into the tow-path's centre with a 
dropping of her ears, well knowing she had been 
found out. 

" Then I suppose," said 
I presently, " you don't like 
London? " 

" I do not, sur — there's 
no Nature in the place. 'Tis 
all people. And I holds when 
you get all people and no 
Nature it ain't natural. 'Tis 
Nature what gives us some- 
thing to be doin', and when 
you've got none of it, then 
people invents their enjoy- 
ments out of their own heads. 

I've heard tell they do queer thin's in London. 
I've heard tell there are women at the theatres there 
what dance wi' scarce no clothes on them, and that 
people come in thousands to see 'en. I've heard they 
go putting themselves into positions as any woman 
would feel shame to be seen in, and that ladies go wi' 
gentlemen to watch 'en. Now, look you, sur, they 
wouldn't do that if birds built nesties in London." 

The amazing amount of truth in so preposterous 
a statement almost bewildered me. 

" You go up to London," said I, " and say that 
where people can hear you." 




86 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

" 'Tis no affair of mine, sur," said he quietly. 
" They ain't my children, or Pd thrash 'en." 

I laughed. I pictured Eynsham Harry thrashing 
the countess of 

" But it's a strange thing," I went on presently — 
" you know the boys of the present generation are 
losing all their interest in Nature. The modern 
school-boy no longer spends his half-holidays in 
bird's-nesting. There's scarcely one of 'em knows 
anything about geology. Collections amongst the 
school-boys now are matters of business. They 
collect stamps only to sell at a profit. We're becom- 
ing worse than a nation of shopkeepers. We're a 
nation of pawnbrokers now, pledging everything we 
have for the sake of an appearance of wealth. I've 
watched the boys at Wellington College. When 
they come out of school for their half-holidays, they 
go straight away to a hosier's shop and buy the latest 
thing in socks, the smartest thing in ties. They go 
to the barber's and get their hair neatly trimmed and 
scented. Why, I remember when I was at school, 
if a boy had scent on his hair, my God, he never for- 
got it!" 

" I don't know nothin' about that," said Eynsham 
Harry. " I never went to school myself." 

"But you can read and write?" said I. 

" Not a word," said he. " All those poster things 
on the hoardings as we come into Birningame mean 
nothin' to me." 



CROPREDY 87 

" I've always thought," said I, " that there were 
many drawbacks to education. Then you know 
nothing of what you should add to the homely 
salutation of good morning? " 

"No — good morning is enough for me," he 
replied. 

" It should be enough for anyone," said I. 

At this moment, while he was looking in the cabin 
mirror, brushing his hair, I took the tiller and 
straightway, being more concerned with our con- 
versation than any matter of steering, I ran her nose 
full tilt into a built-up side of the bank. 

" By God," said he with a laugh, " that gave 
her Warwick! It only shows you, sur, that we must 
have been talkin' very foolish." 

It was quite pleasing, that childish sense of 
fatality. There was the best of Calvinism in it. 

A moment later we took a sharp turn under a 
bridge, and there were the black arms of lock-gates 
stretched out to greet us. 

" What place is this?" I asked as I saw the cluster 
of red-tiled roofs that spoke a village. 

" This is Cropredy, sur — Cropredy Bridge. 
We'll just get through the lock and stop a bit. I 
always go here to the Red Lion for a drink." 



XVII 

THE FIRST PATCHWORK 
QUILT— CROPREDY 

TO the Red Lion we went, leaving the Flower 
of Gloster moored by the bank on the far 
side of the lock; giving Fanny her nose- 
bag, for which she made a pair of big dark 
eyes blink gratefully. 

These country inns with their floors of sawdust, 
their old lead-lighted windows through which the 
sunlight falls and makes the floor a chequer-board of 
gold, they always delight me. It is here of an evening 
you learn something about the land you live in. The 
boards of the trestled tables bear the ill-cut names of 
many a one who has laid down the law and told the 
Prime Minister in a few straight words just what he 
thought of him. 

In the middle of the morning, when the men are 
away working in the fields and the parlour is empty, 
what a place to sit in, to call for a glass of beer, a 
plate of cheese, ere you set forth again upon the 
journey you may be taking! To some inns there 
are small gardens set out with their patchwork of 



90 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

flowers. Where they face upon a street, as did the 
Red Lion of Cropredy then, as often as not a jug of 
flowers stands out upon the window-sill. They are 
a patchwork collection, too. Country people never 
put one kind of flower in a vase by itself. They 
mix them all up — roses and daisies, Canterbury bells 
and geraniums, all are thrust together in one multi- 
coloured mass. That is their idea of colour — a patch- 
work. They know nothing of chromatic scales, of 
tones that blend or harmonies that meet. They mix 
their flowers as they see God mix His. That is good 
enough for them. It is a patchwork. 

It was an old woman far away in the heart of the 
country, as you may fancy, who first thought of a 
patchwork quilt. No artist could ever have thought 
of that. It was an old, old woman with a twinkle 
of laughter in her eye and a child's love of colour in 
her heart. 

One day, when first she was wed, she burnt a hole 
in her red flannel petticoat. It was only a small hole, 
but when she picked up her skirt to cross the road on a 
muddy day, she felt all the neighbours' eyes upon it. 
So she cut a square piece out and stitched another in. 
There was that neatness about it, you could never have 
seen where it was done. 

Now what was the good of the piece she had cut 
out? None at all! But it was excellent flannel. If 
you want to know the truth of the matter, she had 
bought that petticoat for her wedding morning. 



FIRST PATCHWORK QUILT— CROPREDY 91 

Wasn't it a pity to throw it away? Well — she 
saved it. 

That was the birth of the patchwork quilt. 

Along with that piece of flannel, which was tucked 
away in the deep corner of a drawer, there was added 




a square piece out of the seat of her husband's trousers. 
And so, piece by piece, increasing in numbers as the 
family increased, the material of the ultimate patch- 
work quilt was slowly harvested in that drawer. But 
what she was ever to do with them, that she could 
never have said. Necessity decided that for her; for 
it is Necessity who is the greatest craftsman amongst 
men. 



92 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

They grew old and they grew poor. And as they 
grew old, they felt the chill of winter the more; and 
as they grew poor, they had not clothes sufficient 
upon their bed to warm them. 

It was then she thought of her pieces that now 
filled the recess of that old drawer. Necessity 
whispered it in her ear and, picking up her needle, 
she began to sew. In a week the patchwork quilt 
was made; and in the early mornings when they lay 
awake, in all seriousness her husband would point out 
a patch to her and say: 

"Mother — where did that coom from? 1 ' 

" That," said she, " were the tail out of our 
Johnny's first little shirt." 

This is one of the beauties of a real patchwork 
quilt. For these are the things that really keep you 
warm. 



XVIII 

THE RED LION—CROPREDY 

ALMOST from the canal's edge a little street 
/^L runs up, with a row of Tudor cottages on 
/ ^k one side and the high wall of the grave- 
yard on the other. This is the village of 
Cropredy. A few outlying houses there are, of course, 
a farmstead here, there the vicarage; but this little 
street is Cropredy. Down this street the horses of 
the Cavaliers galloped one day with a brave rattling of 
harness and the wind in their plumes. You cannot but 
feel that little has changed since then. Only the canal 
is there, which in those days was never dreamed of. 
But so long has it been in existence now, so long have 
the barges been passing to and fro, that even that 
seems part of the place. 

It is in the midst of this row of cottages that 
you will find the Red Lion. To the gentlest breeze, 
a red sign-board swings outside, adding another 
instrument to the orchestra of sounds which are in- 
separable from the country village. I wish to hear 
no better music than the symphonies which Nature 
plays upon her countless instruments. 

93 



94 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



When we walked into the parlour, two farm- 
hands were al- 
ready there. 
On their way 
from one field 
to another, 
they had 
chosen a path 
which must 
lead them 
through the 
village; and 
the sign of 
the Red Lion 
had swung 
backwards 
and forwards, 
singing its 
song of invita- 
tion. Where 
is the man 
who would 
not have 
stepped with- 
i n ? Their 
pints of ale 
were on the 
trestle table. 
The sun was shining a rich amber through the rough 




THE RED LION— CROPREDY 95 

glass mugs. Their arms, bared to the elbow, were 
burnt and brown. The sawdust of the floor never 
looked so clean. 

"Good mornm'!" said they — "fine morninV 

What club is there in London where a man, if 
he did not know you, would say as much? What 
club is there would provide the entertainment we 
had there then? 

Upon the wall opposite the open fireplace there 
was a board, marked out as a sun-dial, each division 
bearing the value of some number. A ring in the 
centre marked the highest number of all. The board 
was painted black, and all about the face of it were 
little holes where darts had entered. It was a game 
they played to wile away a lazy hour. 

At Eynsham Harry's invitation, we played with 
them then — played for four glasses of ale, while the 
landlord in his apron leaned within the doorway, 
keeping the score with a piece of chalk, pleasantly 
content whoever won or lost. 

And the glass of ale that followed! I can see 
the sun sparkling in it now. Each one of us as we 
raised it to our lips muttered " Good Health " — 
and not only wished, but felt it. 

Is there any club in London where, upon your 
first entrance, old members would treat you with 
such good comradeship as this? 

For every meaning of a club, there is no place to 
touch the village inn. Here a man upon his entrance 



96 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

is straightway at one with all the company — a good 
fellow until he proves that he is not. A gentle 
thirst is the only qualification for membership, and 
it black-balls no one. Not a rule is written, but 
every law is tacitly obeyed. A man expels himself. 
There is none of the terrible formality of com- 
pulsory resignation. If he is not liked, he does not 
enter the club. He condemns himself. It is only 
the hyper-civilised conditions of modern life which 
make these things impossible. In the city you 
must make your rules and print them; but in the 
country, they take their laws from Nature, the book 
of which is spread open in the fields that those who 
run may read. 



XIX 

THE HISTORY OF CROPREDY 

HAD I meant to be chronicler of anything 
beside my journey in the Flower of 
Gloster, doubtless I should have left the 
history of Cropredy alone. But the best 
of a chronicle of this nature is that you may set out 
with one intention and, before you have gone a mile 
or more upon your journey, find yourself in passing 
company with another. 

To speak of the history of any place is much in 
the spirit of the guide's litany; but when I sat alone 
on the lawn of the vicarage garden and read the brief 
history of Cropredy from the papers which the vicar 
was good enough to give me, I said to myself, " This 
is not wonderful — it's true." 

There are no astounding figures of height and 
breadth and depth, therefore I have no desire to 
astonish you with the year of our Lord. It is the 
year of our Lord — if you will have it so — 191 1, and 
the village of Cropredy has been asleep for two 
hundred and sixty-seven years. 

Two hundred and sixty-seven years ago, they 

97 



9 8 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

fought the battle of Cropredy Bridge. But even two 
years before then, the king's standard was set up at 
Edgecote, and all around Cropredy, in the meadows, 
the king's army slept the night before Edgehill. 

I should like to have been sitting that night in 
the parlour of the Red Lion. I would have liked to 
have heard the songs of the Cavaliers as they heralded 
the coming of the morning. 

" King Charles! Who's for a fight now? 
King Charles! Who'll do him right now? " 

The greatest poet of the last century knew well 
the lilt of them. 

But it was two years later, in 1644, that Cropredy 
heard the music of the clash of arms, the thunder of 
battle. Eleven cannon and fourteen small brass and 
leather guns were taken on that day. And Colonel 
Weymes was made a prisoner. You have only to 
stand on Cropredy Bridge, with the meadows at either 
side of you, to see it all; you have only to walk up 
the cobbled pavement in the little street to know 
what a day that was in the history of Cropredy. 

Even now, they still dig up cannon shot, soldiers' 
buttons, and rusty swords when the blade of the 
plough throws back the secretive earth. In the 
churchyard itself there are two tombstones bearing 
each the inscription, " A faithful soldier of King 
Charles ye First." Indeed, the next day after the 
battle — so the records of the church will inform you — 



THE HISTORY OF CROPREDY 99 

it was the vicar's duty to bury five soldiers. Only 
these two of their tombstones remain. 

I think I should like to be a vicar in some country 
parish in England. The peace and quietness of those 
vicarage gardens, walled snugly off from the old 
church, are ideal corners of the world. It must, too, 
be a great thing to tell people what you think of 
them, at least once in every week; to sit at ease in 
your own garden with every flower that you can wish 
for, the old gardener cutting the grass of the lawn to 
the somnolent whirr of the mowing machine, and 
there compose a stirring sermon against the venial sin 
of idleness, sipping your glass of cider as you round a 
well-turned invective against the increase of drinking 
at the Red Lion or the Glass Bottle. I am sure I 
should like to be a vicar, if only for ten days, so long 
as they had two Sundays in them. 

I enjoyed that hour in the vicarage garden while 
I sat upon a deck-chair on the lawn; I enjoyed it as 
well as any spent upon that journey. Maytime in a 
garden is the best of all the year, for a hundred 
flowers are blooming and all the roses yet to come. 

" I don't care," said I to myself as I sat there, 
" I don't care who says aught to the contrary — it's 
good to be alive; and were I the most intellectual 
pessimist in the world, I would sooner be a brainless 
optimist if it lost me the pleasure of this day." 

I remember a man once saying to me, " Optimism 
is the last resource of the pessimist." 



ioo THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

And as is always the case, when a thing sounds 
very clever I am at a loss to reply. At a moment 
like that, it must be something still cleverer, or 
nothing at all, and in common with most people I 
am much better when I say nothing at all. 

But by the time I had sat down to think about 
it, I came to the conclusion it was not so clever after 
all. It was the cry of the pessimist who would be an 
optimist if he dared, but would never dare for fear of 
lessening his intelligence in the eyes of others. 

I thought of this little epigram that morning as 
I sat in the vicar's garden. I expect I smiled as I 
recalled the face of the man who had said it — pale, 
tired, the face of one who is awake only at night, the 
hair long and interesting. And from thinking of 
that, a song came into my head — a flight of fussy 
sparrows across the lawn no doubt had put it there — 

" 'Twas in the merry month of May 
When all the birds were choiring." 

What is more, I sang it. There was no one 
about. I thought I sang it quite well. 



XX 

THE SPARE BOOTLACE 

WE had left Cropredy a little more than an 
hour, when Eynsham Harry stood still 
upon the tow-path and pointed across the 
meadows to where the canal wound 
under one of the countless bridges. 

" Look you, sur," said he, " that bridge on there 
by the third bend." 

I nodded my head. 

" 'Tis called old town bridge. I don't know 
how many years it was ago, but once there was 
a town there, and a war came what blew it right 
away. Leastways, that's what they tell me." 

I turned and looked at the sloping meadows, 
spattered with daisies and with cowslips. A score 
or so of young heifers, white and ruddy brown, were 
peacefully grazing there; a few starlings were hover- 
ing near them, timid with all their fearlessness to get 
their food. It seemed impossible to think that a 
bloody, decimating war could bring about such 
languid peacefulness as that. 

"What was the name of the town?" I asked. 



102 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" I don't know that, sur. I only know there 
was a town. Sometimes now, I hear, they dig up 
things in the fields — pots and the like, of what they 
used to use in the old days. But would you ever 
think it, sur, to see those fields there? They be 
filled with larks' nests now." 

" 'Tis ever the way," said I — " one world builds 
upon another. How do you know that there are 
larks' nests there? " 

" Look up in the sky, sur." 

I looked. Three larks were soaring, infinitely 
high. Their ceaseless music fell to us like fountain 
drops of water. 

" Their mates are on the nest," said he, " and 

there be a hundred more 
of them resting in the 
grass. 'Tis a fine part 
of the country this for 
birds. I've found sedge- 
warblers, reed-warblers, 
and black-headed bunt- 
ings down by the banks of the canal, and there, up 
in those woods, 'tis full of all sorts." 

" Let's come up there now," said I, " and see 
what we can find. I haven't looked for a nest these 
eighteen years." 

He needed no other word to persuade him, and 
tying Fanny to a post by the old town bridge, we 
set out across the fields in the direction of where 




THE SPARE BOOTLACE 103 

the village of Wormleighton with its crown of trees 
stood high upon the hill surveying all the country 
round. 

On our way to the wood we crossed a country 
road. Upon a bank of grass by the side of the 
ditch sat a pedlar eating his lunch, a crust of bread 
and meat. He was only 
a pedlar in bootlaces and " v ^ 

imitation flowers — con- 
ventional roses, red and 
white, cut out from small 
turnip heads, the red 
ones stained with cochi- '£ ; v r^i 
neal. A certain craft 
there was about them, a 

certain simplicity which just saved them from the 
bathos of their foolish wooden stems. 

He held them out, and I stopped to look at them. 
It was then he told me how he cut them out of 
turnip heads. 

" Me own idear, sir — I've never come acrost any 
as does the likes of 'em. Me own idear hentirely. 
I've made these for sixty years." 

" How old are you now? " I asked. 

" Seventy-three, sir." 

" And still tramping the roads?" 

" I don't arst nothin' better, sir." 

" And are you always travelling in the same 
goods? " 




io 4 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" Well, I varies 'em a bit — studs sometimes, then 
back to bootlaces, then garters for the girls, then 
back to studs again." 

"But you always sell the roses?" 

" Yes, I find they go — always. 'Tain't no good 
tellin' a lie about it, but I sold the first of them 
to the Duchess of Kent, the old Queen's mother." 

" I am glad to see you tell the truth about it," 
said I. 

" Well," he replied, " I find it pays." 

I walked away. 

" There are some tricks," said I to Eynsham 
Harry, " that are so cheap as can pay no man to work 
them." 

Now, from the moment I had said that, I felt 
my conscience in reproach against me. 

" But I am no fool to be taken in by a ruse of 
honesty such as that," said I to myself. 

" A pedlar must take the world as he finds it," 
said my Conscience. 

" And must pay for his mistakes," said I, " as 
a tradesman allows for his bad debts." 

Now, a Conscience, if you be fool enough to keep 
one, is a very woman for the last word, to whom, 
if you would be on your best behaviour, you must 
stay and listen whether you like it or not. 

I thought I had got safe away with that last 
retort, but the fiend of my Conscience was quick 
to assure me that had I nothing but a grass bank 



THE SPARE BOOTLACE 105 

on which to sit, a piece of bread and meat for food, 
and that begged at a fellow-creature's door, I might 
stoop to meaner measures than this pedlar. 

I had by this time had enough of it. The 
distance between us was getting greater with every 
step, the penalty to pay to my Conscience harder 
with every moment. 

" If I don't turn back now," said I to myself, 
" I shall never do it at all, and make a bed-fellow 
of this fiend for the night." Whereupon, I said 
I had suddenly thought of my need of a bootlace, 
and, hurrying back, left Eynsham Harry there upon 
the road. 

" I want a bootlace," said I to the pedlar. 

With a ready hand he pulled it out from his 
bunch, and what I gave him my Conscience has 
more account of than have I. 

" 'Tis the ways of one man," said my Conscience, 
as I walked back along the road, " 'tis the ways of 
one man to tell the truth to keep his pride, while 
another tells a lie to save his face." 

" 'Tis no lie at all," said I, " for every man on 
a journey of this nature must need a bootlace and 
to spare." 

It was not more than three days later that I had 
to fit it into my boot and, calling my Conscience 
to account of it, found that she would not answer 
me. Now, isn't that a woman all over? 



T 



XXI 

SCHOOL-DAYS 

a f~~ ^ HERE'S one thing," said I, when I had 
joined Eynsham Harry again, and we 
were making our way across the fields 
once more to the wood, " there's one thing 
where your idea of enjoying yourself falls short." 
" And what's that, sur? " he asked. 
" Spring gone, and you're done for." 
" And how's that, sur? There's more to learn 
of a burd than just where she lays her eggs. She 
has her young to rear through the early months of 
summer; she has to teach 'en to fly; she has to 
teach 'en the best places where they'd most like find 
their food. She has to live herself through the win- 
ter. I've watched the burds here along by the canal; 
I've watched 'en when the snow was four inch deep 
along the tow-path, and all these fields were a sheet 
of white with never a foot-mark on 'en. And look 
you, sur, not that only, but the branches of the trees 
and all the hedges with never a leaf on them, white 
too, every inch, wherever the snow could settle. 
Well, now, sur, if courage is a sort of thing you'd 

1 06 



SCHOOL-DAYS 107 

like to think about, you'll see plenty of it then. 
There's a look in a burd's eye in winter, sur, as I 
wouldn't care to have to see in any child of mine." 

u What sort of a look?" I asked. 

" Well," said he, " 'tis as if the hand of God, as 
I heard a parson say once, was lifted against 'en. 
I've known 'en settle on the barge as we went along, 
so driven was they to look for food. Yes, sur, I 
think birds is the most couragious creatures there is. 
Why, do you know, one day a fly-boat came along 
the five-mile pound between Marston Doles, top of 
Napton Locks, and Griffin's Bridge at Wormleighton 
here. She was a steamboat, and was making up for 
time over the five miles. I suppose a spark must 
have flown out of her funnel and set fire to a little 
bush where a thrush was sitting on her young. Any- 
how, when I came by, I found the bush all charred 
and burnt, and all that remained of that poor little 
burd, still sitting on her nest, burnt to a cinder. 
She'd never left 'en, not when the flames was all 
round her. I haven't heard nothin' better'n that, 
sur, for courage — man or woman." 

"Do you know the notes of all the birds?" I 
asked presently, for the relation of that little incident 
would have demanded some moments' silence from 
anyone. Such a tale you do not hear every day. 

" I'm gettin' to know 'en, sur, but it takes me 
longer'n 'twould most people. I've no more ear for 
music than my horse, Fanny, has. She knows the 



108 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

crack of a whip, and that's about the only note she'll 
dance to. I'm little much better myself, and I don't 
suppose I should ever have taken to study the notes 
of different burds if hadn't a' been for a gentleman I 
saw one evening standing on that swing bridge we 
passed goin' through Thrupp afore we came to 
Shipton-on-Cherwell. He was standing on the bridge 
there, and I had to ask 'en to get off so as for the 
boat to pass through. ' Fine evening,' said he as I 
came up. I agreed wi' 'en and asked 'en was he 
looking for fish, for he'd find a sight more of them 
in the Cherwell. ' There's a pair of reed-warblers,' 
said he, ' built in those rushes last year; I was listening 
to know if I could hear 'en now.' ' Wouldn't it be 
better to see 'en?' said I. And then he told me 
'ow 'e's sight was so bad he could only just find 'is 
way about and, being interested in burds, 'e'd learnt 
all their notes. But then I made out afterwards, sur, 
that he was an organist in one of these churches 
you'll find about the country. 'Tis an easy matter 
for him. I'm getting it meself, but it's a slow job. 
D'you hear that now? " 

We stopped and listened. Amongst all the sounds 
of birds and insects, I could detect one incessant note. 
How I knew that that was what he meant, I cannot 
say; but I was sure of it. It was as when one bids 
you to listen to a sudden movement in a symphony, 
and through all the instruments of the orchestra you 
can detect the notes of one violin, never rising above, 



SCHOOL-DAYS 109 

but stealing through the harmonious melody of the 
whole. 

" I know that," said I— " it's a chiff-chaff." 

He looked at me very steadily for a moment or 
two. 

" If you know more about burds than what I do, 
sur," said he, " 'twould be kind of you to say so. 
I've no want to be making a fool of myself before 
no one." 

I laughed. 

" You needn't be afraid," said I ; " I used to know 
them when I was a boy. It's more the school-days 
coming back again than any knowledge of birds." 

Upon this we had plunged into the woods, and, 
by the time I was half-way up my first tree, with 
Eynsham Harry standing there below me, those days 
were all come back again. It might have been a 
half-holiday and I a boy of ten. 



XXII 

POUR PASSER DOU CEMENT 

MA FIE 

I REMEMBER, amongst the old china in the 
Musee Cluny, finding a bowl of that simple 
design which, you must know, had many years 
ago belonged to one of simple tastes. It was of 
green-white china, and upon the inside, in letters of 
blue that I cannot possibly forget, but could not 
match were heaven dependent on it, were written the 
words, Pour passer doucement ma vie. 

It is often a little thing like that which lives in 
the memory. 

I thought of it again when we reached the little 
village of Wormleighton. Here indeed is a corner 
of the world where I could wish gently to pass my 
life. But I shall say that a hundred times of many 
another place before this chronicle be ended. 

It is the Manor House at Wormleighton where I 
could wish to spend the rest of my days. A fine 
piece, of Elizabethan architecture it is. Indeed, it 
may well be older than that. I would not ask that 



POUR PASSER DOUCEMENT MA VIE in 

any should rigidly believe me when I talk about 
architecture. 

For the mere trouble of signing one's name in a 
book, the present owners are magnanimous enough 
to let one see within. I wondered should I be as 
generous if it were mine. A stranger seeing over your 




house is the pure essence of intrusion. I hate the 
sight of him, even when I would wish to let and 
welcome him as a possible tenant. 

Yet I felt grateful enough to be shown over the 
Manor House at Wormleighton. In September of 
1571 the Earl of Leicester with a brilliant retinue 
stayed there on his way to meet Queen Elizabeth at 
Warwick. She too, upon her progress from Edge- 
cote to Warwick by way of Long Itchington, she too 



ii2 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

slept the night there ere she passed on to meet her 
Leicester. 

But it is the memories of Prince Rupert which 
cling closest to the place. There you may still see 
the Star Chamber where he dined the night before 
the battle of Edgehill. 

" There is one panelled room," said the little 
maid who showed me round. " Would you like to 
see that? " 

I said that indeed I would, and straightway she 
took me there. 

Before we entered, she knocked softly on the old 
oak door. A voice as softly from within bid us 
enter. The little maid opened the door, and there, in 
no large room, but panelled to the ceiling in warm, 
brown oak, sat an old lady by the mullioned window, 
a sewing basket upon her lap and in her hands a 
piece of embroidery through which her needle 
glittered and disappeared, glittered and disappeared 
to every movement of her skilful fingers. 

Never in my life have I felt such an intruder as I 
did then. 

She bowed to me and I bowed to her. 

" It's very beautiful," I muttered foolishly. 

" It is indeed," said she, and fell to working at her 
embroidery again, never dreaming that I had meant 
not only the panelling; never dreaming that in that 
word beautiful I had included the glimpse of the old 
garden outside, and above all herself. Indeed the 



POUR PASSER DOUCEMENT MA VIE 113 

panelling was wonderful, the garden was wonderful 
too. But it was she who made the picture. I shall 
remember her when all these other things have gone 
out of my head. 

In another moment I had thanked her, excused 
myself and retired. And as I walked down the 
passages into the garden once more, those words on 
the old bowl in the Musee Cluny came softly back 
into my mind — "Pour passer doucement ma vie." 



XXIII 
THE HEDGEROW PHILOSOPHY 




SOON after Wormleighton, we passed the last 
of those Oxfordshire bridges which make so 
characteristic a feature in all that meadow 
landscape. Onwards from there, through 

Marston Doles and 
Napton, it was scarce 
worth one's while to 
travel. 

I sat disconsolately 
on the cabin roof and 
hoped for better things, but they did not come. We 
passed no village of interest then. It seemed as though 
the canal had wilfully sought deserted channels. For 
the first few corners that we reached, every hope I 
had rose expectant at the thought of what might be 
beyond. That is the best of a corner in this world. 
At least it promises; without which, hope might die 
of sheer starvation. Even a promise, broken, is some- 
thing to live upon; yet there comes a time when 
they are but husks in the mouth. I grew tired of 
these broken promises at last. 

X14 



THE HEDGEROW PHILOSOPHY 115 

" Does it improve at all between this and 
Coventry? " I asked Eynsham Harry presently. 

He looked at me steadily, and then — which is an 
event with him — he smiled. 

" It's very samesome, sur," said he, " all the ways 
from here to Coventry." 

" Then why did you smile? " I asked. 

" Well, sur," he replied, " if you'll pardon me 
saying so, there be nothing the matter wi' you, but 
that you be young." 

"You mean foolish?" said I, for it would seem 
that one has to be well-advanced in years before 
one makes a compliment out of the accusation of 
youth. 

" No, sur, I said nothing so impertinent. 'Twas 
young I said, and young I means. You want your 
cake before you've eat your bread and butter. 'Tis 
the way wi' my son John — ' If you're not hungry 
enough,' I say to 'en, ' to eat your bread and butter 
first, you ain't hungry enough to eat cake.' " 

" I've heard that argument before, you know," 
said I. " It rakes up memories of days I'd give much 
to live over again. But it's not sound. It never 
convinced me then. It doesn't even convince me 
now. I've stodged myself many a time to get to my 
piece of cake. It only takes the gilt off the ginger- 
bread by the time you do come to it." 

" Well — isn't that a good thing, sur? " said he. 
" The cake is not so wholesome, and it costs more 



u6 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

than bread and butter. Come a time and you'll do 
without it altogether." 

It is not that I am accustomed to having the 
better of an argument; but I felt none the less sur- 
prised that I came off so badly in this. 

" Now where do you," said I, " who neither 
know how to read nor write — where do you get 
your logic from?" 

" I don't know, sur," he replied— and with such 
honesty as I would give much to meet with every 
day — " I don't know, sur, for I don't rightly under- 
stand 'ee when 'ee talks about logic. I says what I 
thinks, and mostly I thinks what I finds. This world 
ain't no easier to live in, sur, for the help of luxuries. 
There's scarce a man finds an easier place of the 
world than that tramp we met selling bootlaces out- 
side Wormleighton. They say the more you have 
the more you want, but, by God! it's the more you 
have, the less you can do without. Now, that ain't 
making the world an easy place to live in." 

" Then why? " said I, " did you refuse my offer 
of twenty shillings a week and look for thirty? " 

When a man is talking as much sense as this, it 
is taking no mean advantage to put such a question 
to him. He took it quite good-naturedly. He 
smiled as he thought of our bargain in the Nag's 
Head. 

" Because," said he, " the more you have, sur, 
the more you want, and the more you want, the more 



THE HEDGEROW PHILOSOPHY 117 

you have to pay for it. When a gentleman like you 
comes out a-boating for little more than a holiday 
and offers five shillings more a week than a man 
expects, 'tis only right to take it that he's offered less 
than he's ready to pay." 

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed, " d'you mean to 
say that fifteen shillings would have been enough?" 

" It would indeed, sur — and I'll take it now, if so 
be you think I've not done fairly by you." 

I lay back on the cabin roof, and, upon my soul, 
I laughed. 

" You're quite right," said I. " One does these 
things so often with one's eyes open, that after a time 
they become glazed. I remember once when I lived 
near Covent Garden, I used to get up early of a 
morning before the market closed, and I'd get Darwin 
tulips for twopence a bunch. Now, when I go to 
a florist up west, they charge me a shilling. What's 
more, I pay it. It's the same thing." 

" Well, I'll take fifteen shillings, sur," he re- 
peated, " if so be you think I haven't done fairly by 
you." 

" I'd sooner give you five more than fifteen less," 
said I. " A man's philosophy is worth it any day of 
the week. But what I want to know is, where you 
learn these things. You say you think what you find; 
but what do you find? " 

He was silent for a moment while he took the 
narrow passage beneath a bridge. When we had 



u8 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

come out into the open canal once more, he turned 
and looked at me. 

" Well, sur, last year I was coming along this 
very pound, and as I came by a corner down there — 
I was just in front of Fanny on the tow-path — I 
started up a hawk from the hedge. I thought she 
could be up to no good, so I marked the place with 
me eye, and at first when I came along I could see 
nothing. But when I went down on me hands and 
knees, I made out a dead field-mouse — them little 
creatures wi' the pointy nose, the size of a man's little 
finger. Did I say she was dead? She wasn't quite. 
The little beast was quivering. The hawk had dug 
her out of her hole, and there was the little store of 
nuts and berries she'd set by her for the winter time, 
all scattered about in the grass. 

" ' Look you here, mother,' I said to my wife. 
' Whenever you've got a sixpence in your pocket 
and want to buy something you don't need, just make 
a little nest of it.' 

" ' If you mean that mouse,' said she, ' what's the 
good when the hawk came and took it? ' " 

I echoed that good lady's sentiments to the letter. 

" Had I seen that," said I, " it would have driven 
me to the utmost limits of extravagance." 

"Well, 'tis curious," said Eynsham Harry, "the 
way people do argue. If it hadn't been for that 
kestrel, I might never have learnt that 'tis the ways 
of the field-mouse to make her store for the winter 



THE HEDGEROW PHILOSOPHY 



119 



months. The first thing I reckoned was that for 
one mouse that had been killed, there were a thou- 
sand what had made their store against winter in 
safety. Why, there must be hawks, sur, and hawks 
must live, same as Jews and company promoters, but 
it isn't every man as need be caught by 'em." 

" It comes to this," said I, " that you're the true- 




: M$v% 



^^^ . r~***?fc-- » -~=- 






-i-Ar' 



born philosopher. You learn your philosophy from 
the hedgerows. I only play at it." 

" Well, sur," said he, " I've often sat and looked 
into a hedge where all the insects be creepin', and I've 
said to myself: 'You be near as ever you be in your 
life to the greatest secret in the world.' But, by 
God, I've never found it, sur." 

I turned away, disheartened with my own short- 
comings. 

"Where does that branch of the canal lead to?" 
I asked presently. We were approaching a bridge 



120 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

on t|?e right, raked over the water in a long low 
curve that made a picture in itself. 

" That, sur," said he, " is the branch of the 
Warwick and Napton." 

" It goes right into the town?" 

"Yes, sur." 

" Then let's turn out of this," said I, " and stop 
the night at Warwick." 



XXIV 
WARWICK 

WHEN I saw the countless volumes show- 
ing in the windows of the booksellers, all 
relating to Warwick and its environs, I 
said, " Not one word of the history of 
Warwick will I write. This voyage of the Flower of 
Gloster is a voyage of discovery. I can find nothing 
here but what has been found already." 

Yet what one can say of Warwick beside the rela- 
tion of its history, it puzzles me to know. I was 
debating on that very subject as I walked up the 
High Street, my attention first this way and then 
that, yet history, nothing but the history of England, 
stared me in the face. Outside Leicester's Hospital, 
a man was acting guide to a group of people, and to 
every word he said, their mouths, almost impercept- 
ibly, widened in aperture. 

" It's no good telling us all those names," I heard 
one of them say at last — " we shan't remember one 
of 'em. Just let's know when it was built and if 
those beams are real oak. We've got to go over the 



122 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

Castle yet, and by schedule we must catch the late 
train to Stratford-on-Avon." 

I stood for a moment to listen, and in five minutes 
heard the history of Leicester's Hospital over three 
hundred and fifty odd years. When he had finished, 
the speaker of the group turned to one of his com- 
panions. 

" Did the Morgans see this place when they were 
in Warwick? " he asked. 

" No," said the other. He shook his head to 
emphasize it. 

" Well," said the first, " we can tell 'em all 
about it. Three hundred and fifty years — it's great." 

I walked on, trying to think of those three hun- 
dred and fifty years. It was impossible. I could 
only think of that five minutes. 

A few yards down the street, a man stopped, 
smiled genially, and thrust out a hand of welcome. 

"Hallo, Matherson! " he exclaimed jovially, 
" never thought I should find you in Warwick." 

" No more of a surprise, Cubberwheat," said I at 
a venture, " than my finding you here." 

Now, I never saw anything quite so sudden as the 
fall of that man's expression. In one moment it 
dropped the full ninety degrees which lie between 
pleasant satisfaction and offended dignity. Mather- 
son, no doubt, was a man whom he wished to stand 
well with; Matherson was a man whom he was proud 
to know. 



WARWICK 123 

" My name's not Cubberwheat! " said he em- 
phatically, with insult ringing in his voice. 

" My name's not Matherson," said I. 

"What! not Matherson of Coventry?" he asked, 
for if I were not Matherson of Kamschatka, he was 
determined to have it that I was Matherson of some- 
where. 

" Not even Matherson of Coventry," said I. 

" Well — I'm certainly not Cubberwheat," said 
he. " Cubberwheat! " he added in disdain, and 
thereat turned upon his heel abruptly leaving me 
to stand in the street. 

Apart from a slightly wanting sense of humour, 
I have nothing to say against this gentleman's pride. 
Doubtless his name was Jones; but whatever it was, to 
anyone save Cubberwheat himself, the name Cubber- 
wheat is an insult. But it is quite amusing when 
you think that it applies also to the name of Jones. 
If I were to address Mrs. Cubberwheat — supposing 
she exists — by the name of Jones, I doubt if a sense 
of humour would save her. It would be a great one 
if it did. 

Seemingly, not only is the Englishman's home 
his castle, but his name is the flag he flies to show 
he is in residence. 

I took a furnished house in the country once, and the 
owner assured me, with a marked tone of seriousness in 
his voice, that there was a flag-staff in the garden and 
a Union Jack in the boot-cupboard under the stairs. 



i2 4 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

" Of course, if you have to go up to town," 
said he, " you can just put the flag back into the 
cupboard." 

" Then why is the rent only three guineas a 
week? " I asked him. 

He shook his head sorrowfully, for I had signed 
the agreement by then. 

" It ought to be more," said he. 

" Undoubtedly, it ought," said I. 

" But I hear you write books," he added. 

I admitted the impeachment. 

"Well, if you like," said he, "you can put the 
place into your next book. You can use the address. 
I don't mind." 

" Some of my books have a very bad name," 
I warned him. 

"Oh! then perhaps you'd better leave it alone," 
said he. " At any rate, here's the key of the boot- 
cupboard." 

I wish that more people had his sense of humour 
and that less were conscious of what they have. 

I passed another bookshop after I had left my 
friend Cubberwheat. Within the window I saw 
volumes bearing the titles, Shakespeare's Land, War- 
wick and Its History, Shakespeare's Avon, and so on. 

" I'm sure there will be nothing about Warwick 
in my barge book," I said to myself. And there 
is not. 



XXV 

THE GATE INTO THE BLACK 
COUNTRY 

I HAD been in the Black Country before. I had 
driven over many of those roads through the 
charred heart of that desert of land, which is 
more like to death than the Dead Sea. It is an 
awful yet wonderful part of the world. God has 
deserted it — Jeft it absolutely to the hand of man. 
And in those hands, as one might well suppose, all 
but human nature lies dead. All the green goodness 
of the earth has gone. From one mile to another 
there is no blade of grass will live. The very mould 
is black, a bed of ashes in which not even a weed 
could find its nourishment. 

I have heard the complaint, half jest, half earnest, 
that the Almighty might have done things better 
than He has. " If I were God," a modern author 
titled some pamphlet that he wrote. That, no doubt, 
was the jest in earnest. But you have only to go 
into the Black Country to know what can be done 
with a wonderful world when God delivers it into 
the hand of man. 

125 



126 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

I know very well that there is the pulse of 
England's greatness, that out of Bradford, Halifax, 
Huddersfield, Rochdale, and Burnley, the stream of 
molten metal flows through the veins and arteries of 
a great nation, nerves her to face her enemies, and 
feeds those energies by which alone she can maintain 
her position in the world. 

But what a price to pay, and what a coinage to 
pay it in! If you believe in the efficacy of war, then 
doubtless the Black Country will seem most wonder- 
ful to your mind. In fact, whether you believe in it 
or not, those belching furnaces and that poisoned land 
must make you marvel as you pass it by. The black 
sweeping hills with scrubby bushes leafless and dead; 
the men and women, white-faced and dirty with the 
everlasting falling of the sooty air; the thousand 
factories and the countless furnaces; the utter lifeless- 
ness in all this seething mass of life, however much 
he might shudder at it, a man must stop and realise 
its greatness. 

There are two places in the world which seem 
like hell to me, two places which, if I had the 
making of hell, I would closely imitate; the one is 
Monte Carlo and the other the Black Country, 
two opposite poles, the last extremes of luxury and 
labour. 

And here, all the year round, thousands and 
thousands of human beings work out their salvation. 
One almost asks if salvation be possible; for not only 



THE GATE INTO THE BLACK COUNTRY 127 

the skin but the lungs, not only they but the heart, 
and not only the heart but the very soul of a people 







must be blackened in such an atmosphere. It seems 
fitting in irony, that when they take their holidays, 
they should throng to a place called Blackpool — a 
very pandemonium of amusements where for a time 



i28 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

they can forget the sweat and labour of their daily 
lives. It is just forgetting, and that is all. 

Now Birmingham, beside being the centre of all 
the canal traffic of England, is, as it were, the outer 
gate of all this sunless country. Why I should have 
gone so far as even to approach it again, I can 
scarcely understand. 

" If it's the country you want to see, sur," 
Eynsham Harry warned me, " then have my advice 
and do nothing wi' Birningame. I've seen more 
dead dogs and cats in the water between Knowle 
and Olton Bridge than ever I have thrushes in the 
hedges." 

Notwithstanding even this, I went, and to this 
moment regret the hours we wasted. From Turner's 
Green to Knowle, along a ten-mile pound, the 
surrounding country might well be worse. Then 
came the six locks at Knowle, up which we climbed 
wearily, a height, it must have been, of over a hundred 
feet before we reached the top. The only one of us 
who really enjoyed it was Fanny. Here she was 
given the bucket with her fodder, and for the next 
hour, while we raised and lowered one lock after 
another, munched steadily with that appetising sound 
all horses make when they are eating. 

At the end of it, I caught a glance from Eynsham 
Harry as I stood up to ease my back; there was, as 
well, the suspicion of a smile in his eye. 

" What is it? " I asked. 



THE GATE INTO THE BLACK COUNTRY 129 

" Do you think you'd like the life a-boatin', 
sur? " he inquired solemnly. 

" Life is much the same whichever way you take 
it," said I. " Tve never met a road yet but what 
it had a hill to it some way or other." 

"Quite true, sur," said he; "and it isn't even 
experience will teach some people what they can 
expect to find on the other side of the hill before 
they sets to climb it." 

Then I understood the light of laughter in his eye. 

" You mean we've sweated up these six locks for 
nothing? " said I. 

"Well, sur, there's no sweating, if he comes by 
it honest, can hurt any man ; but you don't be the 
gentleman wi' the tastes I think you have, if you 
like your journey on from Knowle to Birningame." 

No one ever assessed my tastes so accurately. I 
chafed against it the whole journey; but when a 
man has put himself in the way of a bad bargain, he 
is not going readily to admit he is made a fool of. 
I stuck to my pride as long as I could; sat on my 
favourite seat on the cabin roof, and hailed with joy 
a bank of blue-bells which lent their colour in a deep 
purple to the dark reflection of the dirty water. 

Eynsham Harry said nothing, but I felt that he 
was just biding his time till we should come to the 
outskirts of Birmingham. And after Solihull, they 
began in earnest. The ugly buildings of the labourers 
and artisans commenced to line the canal side. The 



130 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

trees and fields grew less and less in number. He 
had not exaggerated for a moment, when he spoke 
of the dead dogs and cats in the water. One after 
another we passed them, their milk-white swollen 
bodies lifting high above the stagnant water. 

Even the men passing us through the locks lay 
inert and lifeless on their cabin roofs, as though the 



,r&« 




r 

I g ^ 

journey of the last few days through all that blackened 
country had brought them to exhaustion. 

At last I turned to Eynsham Harry and admitted 
my folly. 

"YouYe quite right," said I: "there are some 
hills it would be as well to learn of before one climbs 
them. What's the quickest way out of this?" 



THE GATE INTO THE BLACK COUNTRY 131 

He never so much as showed a sign of triumph 
when I admitted my defeat. 

" Our best way now, sur," said he, " would be 
to turn back till we come to Lapworth. There be 
a junction there wi' the Stratford-on-Avon canal 
going through Preston Bagot and Wootton-Wawen. 
I think maybe that 'ud more suit your fancy. 'Tis 



t ... 




■ 






mikl 



Vv. 



close by Henley-in-Arden, and the world's quieter 
there'n what it be here." 

I swung the tiller over straight away as he un- 
hitched the tow-line. 

" May I never realise again," said I, " how 
great a country England is." 

And there are many who, if they stood at the 
outer gate of the Black Country, would say the same. 



XXVI 

THE STRATFORD-ON-AVON 
CANAL 

I NEVER did a better piece of business than 
when I took Eynsham Harry's advice and turned 
back to Lapworth. To be quite accurate, the 
junction of the two canals is at Kingswood, and 
from there through Preston Bagot is but a matter of 
thirteen miles. But the waterway, as I passed along 
it in the Flower of Gloster, was deserted, and they 
are thirteen miles right out of the track of the 
world. 

Sometimes, they tell me, a barge makes its solitary 
way down to Stratford, but the locks have in the 
crevices of their gates all that luxuriant growth of 
water-weed which shows you how seldom they are 
used. 

Many and many a mile of canal in England now 
is thrown out of service by the iron roads, which as 
yet have not succeeded — as also the canals, to the 
critical eye of Anna Laetitia — in fitting themselves 

132 



THE STRATFORD-ON-AVON CANAL 133 

into the landscape. Will they ever indeed become 
so intimate a part of the soil as have the harrow and 
the plough? Truly, I wonder what Anna Laetitia 
would have to say, did she hear the thunder of the 
express down one of the great railroads through this 
very country she loved so well? Quite easily could I 
imagine her now sitting down at her desk to write 
another paper, but this time in praise of the Stratford- 
on-Avon canal; calling forth the evil Genius of that 
iron road which has drawn its fretted lines across 
the face of Nature, thrilling her reader thereby 
with the horrors of civilisation. And if in those 
days she abused the canal, what would she say 
of the Black Country now? Certainly she would 
no longer put on her white cambric and her black 
gloves. I can see her in crape and jet from top 
to toe. 

But now from the dull crape of the Black 
Country we came to the meadows once more, all in 
their spring muslin, and such muslin as only Nature 
knows the weaving of. The white thorn hedges 
were half in bloom, the buds some green, some 
breaking white. That alone is a trimming of lace 
which the most cunning fingers in Spain have 
never equalled, not even for a prince's cradle or a 
cardinal's robe. Here and again in the hedgerows 
stood a crab-apple tree, pink-white in bloom. Did 
they ever in France paint such dainty flowers on 
silk as these? And by the water's edge grew those 



134 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

reeds, yet young enough to keep their pale flesh- 
colour before they swelled into the full green of 
summer. 






■ 












What a joy it was after the smoke and ashes 
of Birmingham! I lay full stretched upon the 
cabin roof, my face in my hands, the sun beat- 
ing down upon my head, drinking it in as, in 



THE STRATFORD-ON-AVON CANAL 135 

summer, the labourer in the corn-fields drinks 
his jug of cider to ease the parched dryness of his 
throat. 

" How can a man care for that devastating march 
of civilisation," said I, " when it means the ultimate 
destruction of such places in the world as this? 
God knows we must progress; we cannot stop still. 
The mind must grow, or it will atrophy. But if ever 
a plant needed light in which to bear its flower, that 
plant is the mind." 

But this is just the way a man talks when God 
is in His Heaven and the complete Tightness of 
the world is on every side of him. It is, as a 
matter of fact, only in the deepest tribulation of 
his soul that he speaks truth; for when everything 
goes well with him a man has little judgment to 
boast about, and says the first thing which, with 
the lightness of a feather, rises flamboyant to his 
head. 

I could not have found such great wisdom in 
what I said aloud that morning as I lay stretched out 
on the cabin roof of the Flower of Gloster, because, no. 
sooner had I said it than I began to sing — with such 
voice as God has given me — all the snatches of songs, 
every one I knew. Where I had forgotten the 
words, I made them up. Sometimes they rhymed, 
sometimes they did not. It was a happy matter of 
chance. 



136 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" 'Twas in the merry month of May 
When all the birds were choiring." 

I began with that, no doubt because it was still 
in my head from that morning in Cropredy. In 
the country, a tune such as this stays with you 
an unconscionable length of time. You hum it to 
yourself last thing at night before you go to sleep; 
you wake up, and there it is still with you in the 
morning. 

Now, all this is better than any philosophy. A 
man who can sing to himself — when, in such a case 
as mine, it cannot be particularly pleasant for him to 
listen to — is far on the way towards taking life in 
the easiest way imaginable. 

It is surely not all a question of mating when 
birds raise their voices? What mistress can ever 
hear her master, the lark, when he sings up in those 
heights of air in the dim distant chancel of the clouds? 
I am quite certain that even Bellwattle, whose 
only knowledge of music is composed of a couple 
of lines from the most antiquated ballads that 
were ever composed in the early fifties, would 
never have listened to me that morning for five 
minutes. 

No; when a man sings to himself, it is because 
he can dispense with all philosophy. Wherefore, 
I did away with my speculations upon the progress 
of the mind. It mattered little to me then whether, 



THE STRATFORD-ON-AVON CANAL 137 

like a bulb, it could grow in darkness, or, like a 
seed, it must have the light. All that mattered was 
the whole world, decked in muslin; and so I 
sang, with what effect I have already given you to 
suppose. 






1 








■ i 






XXVII 
LOW SON FORD 

IN those parts they call it Lonesome Ford. That 
is better than just the giving it of a good name. 
'Tis as though from long association the place 
had named itself. It lies alone in a cup of the 
hills like a polished pebble in the deep pool of a 
twinkling brook. Right through the centre of the 
village runs the canal under an old red-stone bridge, 
with the low tiled lock-house just beside it. Here and 
there the old half-timbered cottages are placed with 
but little sense of order — rough facets of the stone 
that glitter with colour as you look down on the 
village from the hills above. 

There may be other villages in England more 
peaceful than this, but in my journey in the Flower 
of Gloster I never came across them. In towns and 
cities the houses can well be said to be awake. 
There is an alertness about the appearance of their 
windows; the doors open and shut with a sound that 
has life even in its echo. But here in Lowson Ford 
all men and things would seem to be asleep. The 
cottage windows open to the sun, the doors ajar, the 

133 



LOWSON FORD 139 

gardens patient in the heat; even the farmers' wag- 
gons, with their heavy wheels and cumbrous horses, 
saunter through the street all as in the idle causeless- 
ness of slumber. 

I would not for one moment say they do not 
work in Lowson Ford. I saw farm labourers coming 










and going from the White Horse Inn, so work 
there must have been a-doing somewhere. But had 
they been going and coming from the White Horse 
Inn in their hundreds, then I should only have felt 
that it was I who was asleep, dreaming one of those 



i 4 o THE ''FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

mad summer dreams when things happen, all dis- 
proportionate to what they are. 

You could well spend a summer in the village of 
Lowson Ford and forget that the world was moving 
round about you. It is an event, unparalleled 
almost in excitement, when a barge comes through 
to Stratford. Then all the little boys and girls rush 
down the street to the old red-stone bridge to watch 
it as it passes through the lock. The fat lock- 
keeper's wife wakes from her long months of som- 
nolence, bestirs herself under the admiring eye of all 
the children, though she has nothing whatever to do. 
Her big woolly dog, of such a breed as I have never 
seen before or since, rouses himself from the sun- 
warmed coping stones of the lock and follows after 
her, with a sense of importance, half awake, watching 
her with his eyes wherever she goes. Oh, Lowson 
Ford, I can tell you, is wide awake then, when a 
barge goes through the lock! But the barge goes on 
its way into the busy world; the smoke of its little 
chimney from the cabin fire trails round the corner 
and, blue as it is, melts into the bluer air of distance. 
Then Lowson Ford turns on its side once more and 
for many a month to come sleeps like a baby in its 
cradle of the hills. If ever I need sleep to wake 
again, I shall go and find my pillow there. 

Yet even in such a place as this so grim a thing 
as tragedy can find its way. But then, as you might 
so well suppose, it is not the tragedy of distorted face, 



LOWSON FORD 



141 



of twisted features of the like you find in cities. 
The little tragedy I met in Lowson Ford had not 




? 



such ugliness as made me shudder when I came face 
to face with it. 

It was making late in the afternoon when we 
came there. There was that warmer colour in the 



142 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

sun as when it throws its light through the dust and 
heat of the day's journey. The whole village seemed 
deserted, though through the open doors of the 
cottages I could just make out the old women seated 
over their evening meal, pouring the tea from warm 
brown earthenware tea-pots into their big kitchen 
cups, nodding their heads and gossiping. Old 
women must talk, for Nature leaves them little else 
to do. 

But one figure commanded all my interest, even 
my curiosity. He stood on the bridge looking down 
the canal at the Flower of Gloster, watching her 
silently as she entered the lock, crossing to the other 
side, still watching us in silence as we came through 
into the open pound once more. 

Here we moored her to the canal bank and, jump- 
ing off, I came up on to the bridge to speak with 
him. He had that look of a man who has yielded 
up all his active interest in a busy world and is con- 
tent to be a silent spectator of the life which passes 
close around him. 

" If of nothing else," thought I, " I shall learn? 
something of Lowson Ford." 

He looked just the sort of man who would be 
proud of being the oldest inhabitant. Yet he was 
not so old, after all. 

" Thirty years I've been here, sir," said he. 

" And what age are you now? " I asked. 

" Seventy-one." 




-6 







i 4 4 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

"You get the pension, then?" 

" Well " — he smiled — " I'm qualified for it, as age 
goes. But I've a little bit of land and a cottage 
of my own. I don't take the pension. I'm quite 
comfortable — as comfortable as I shall ever wish 
to be." 

He pointed to a little half-timbered cottage, just 
climbing up the hill. I could see the late tulips like 
brilliant coloured stones in the prim mosaic of the 
garden's flowers. 

" 'Tis a charming place," said I. " If I were your 
age, I would not ask better than to spend the rest of 
my days there." 

His eyes looked very firmly out before him, and 
under his white beard and moustache I saw his lips 
set as though he were suffering a pain he would 
have no one know of. 

" May be I'll stay there," said he slowly — " I 
haven't made up my mind." 

"You don't mean to say you're going to move?" 

He just bent his head in the affirmative. 

"But not into a town?" I asked. 

"No, sir — no — not into a town. I lived in 
London once, when first I married — but — but it 
didn't agree with — my wife. We moved then to 
Basingstoke — that didn't agree with her either. 
Then we came here, and we've been here thirty 
years." 

"How long have you been married?" 



LOWSON FORD 145 

" Fifty-one years." 

His eyes blinked quickly and he screwed his lips 
again. I had almost asked him what pain it was, 
when the look passed away once more and silence 
came beside us for a while. 

" Is your wife up at the cottage?" I asked 
presently. 

He nodded his head, but never turned his eyes 
to look in that direction. And then I felt impelled 
to notice something strange. It was more than the 
look that had passed across his face. It was more 
than the pain I thought he had spasmodically been 
suffering. His eyes were filled with water; but that 
I imagined might well be the weakness of old age. 
The whites of them were tinged with red. But as 
the strangeness of his manner impressed me, I began 
to think I had not read these signs aright. Suddenly 
I felt awkward, ill at ease. It came upon me quickly 
that he wished to be alone. Whereupon I asked 
him if he had had his tea, thinking doubtless of those 
passing glimpses I had got through the cottage doors 
as we came by. 

He shook his head. 

" Well — you mustn't let me keep you," said I. 
" I expect tea is your best meal in the day." 

Then he turned his face and looked at me, and 
never have I seen so deep a look of suffering in the 
face of any man. It seemed as if he knew more 
agony of mind than he could bear. 



146 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" I've been trying to go this last hour," he 
muttered brokenly, " but I daren't." 

" Daren't? Why not? " 

" My wife died yesterday — sir — she's lying up 
there in the cottage." 

Once more came silence to ease us. He leant 
back again on the bridge, and the muscles in his face 
were twitching under the thin white hairs of his 
beard. 

There is nothing ugly in such a tragedy as this; 
but it is none the less great for that. I thought of 
the utter desolation in his mind; for many a time, no 
doubt, he had stood upon that bridge, watching the 
life of the village until the welcome hour came that 
called him up to tea. And now, of all the hours in 
his day of desolation, this was the most terrible he 
must face. 

" I'm sorry," I said lamely — " I'm sorry I did not 
understand sooner." 

He shut his lips as he made another effort to be 
brave. 

"That's all right, sir. I tried to tell you before, 
but it was difficult. It is a great parting, you know, 
after fifty-one years." 

I have remembered that simple phrase of his best 
of all — " It is a great parting." How great a parting 
it must be, I do not dare to think; for after such a 
time neither a man nor a woman run their race alone, 
but like little children, confidingly, hand in hand. 



LOWSON FORD 147 

A few words more to make our parting less abrupt, 
and then I thought it best to leave him. One fights 
these tragedies best alone. 

I walked through the village then and came 
eventually to the barge by another way. Fanny was 
hitched once more to the tow-line, and we set off. 
As we turned the corner of the hill, I looked back. 
He was still there, still resting both his arms upon the 
bridge. He had not dared as yet to go back to his 
tea. What is more, I knew he never would. The 
late evening must creep down the village street, and 
then, when the shadows spread their cloaks over the 
things one sees so plainly in the day, he would steal 
back alone to his cottage and with wide eyes watch 
through the night until 'twas day once more. 



XXVIII 
YARNINGDALE FARM 

STEEP, on one side the canal, between Lowson 
Ford and Preston Bagot, the high land con- 
tinues for a mile or so, and, soon after we had 
turned the corner, leaving the village out of 
sight, I took to the tow-path, walking for a while 
there alone by Fanny's side. 

That old fellow on the bridge had brought me 
the need of silence and my own company. Even the 
philosophy of Eynsham Harry would have seemed 
out of place, though I have no doubt he would have 
had much to say that was wise upon the matter. 
One may not think conclusively by oneself — I am 
sure that I do not,— but at least one thinks pleasantly. 
Even that tragedy, as I thought over it alone, seemed 
to fill me with a sense of awe which I could not call 
unpleasant. I should only have found its irony had 
I talked of it aloud. 

So I walked alone with Fanny, soothed, I have 
no doubt of it, by the unvarying expression of her 
face as she toiled monotonously along the tow-path. 
Often I glanced at her, and she suggested nothing 

148 



YARNINGDALE FARM 149 

to alter the even tenor of my mind. Those were 
peaceful days, those days on the Flower of Gloster. 

"Sur!" 

I looked back. 

" Will 'ee take the tiller a while and let me get 
back? Look you, I forgot to get milk in Lonesome 
Ford. The jug's empty." 

It seemed a pity that he should have all the way 
to go back. I looked about me right and left. On 
the crest of the hill above us there was a house in the 
midst of a clump of elms. Apple trees blossomed 
near it. I could see their white lime-washed trunks. 
There were outhouses beside. Asuredly it was a 
farm. 

" I'll climb up there," said I. " Give me the jug. 
That's a farm. They're bound to have some there." 

He handed it to me over the side, and, taking a 
gap in the hedge, I set off up the steep grass slope, 
still glad to be alone. 

They had made the hill an orchard, and never do 
fruit trees offer so fine a pageant of their blossoms as 
when, tier upon tier, they rise above each other up a 
steep hill-side. And here, on the crown of the hill, 
in the midst of its orchard of white-trunked apple 
trees spread with bloom, stood an old English 
farm-house, one of those places that seem to make 
English history a thing of yesterday. If I came 
across one, I came across a thousand in that journey 
in the Flower of Gloster, and each fresh place I found 



ISO THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

had all the new wonder of age to make it as beautiful 
as the last. 

Through a wooden gate into a small odd garden 
before the house — where flowers grew, it would seem, 
more by favour because they liked the place than 
from any care or cultivation, — I found a path of un- 
even flag-stones up to the door. There I knocked, 
waited, and then knocked again. There was no 
answer. 

In the farm-yard close by, the chickens were 
scratching in the hay; an old cow chewed the cud 
under the apple trees in the orchard. She had a 
rolling jaw and a calm eye, which she quietly fixed on 
me. As good as speaking, she told me that no one 
was at home. On the window-sill outside an open 
latticed window a black cat lay fast asleep, where the 
last light of the day's sun could warm her. A brood 
of young chickens peeped out of the bars of their 
coop as I still waited on the step before the door. 
Yet I could not believe that the place was utterly 
deserted. The farmer's wife would come presently. 
She was out at the back of the house doing her share 
in the work of the farm. But no — I heard no one. 
I looked up at the bedroom windows: they were all 
closed. Then, just as I was about to knock again, I 
realised that the open window was to my purpose. 

As I stepped across to it, the black cat opened 
her eyes, stretched forth her front paws, and yawned. 
Her mouth and tongue were scarlet. A tulip in the 



YARNINGDALE FARM 151 

bed below her was not a brighter red. But she 
moved no more than this, even when I leant across her 
and peeped into the room through the open window. 

For a moment, in the strong contrast of the shade 
with the sunlight outside, I could see nothing. By 
degrees it grew more plain. It was their parlour into 
which I looked. There was the old open chimney 
with the broad oak beam above it. The beams 
across the ceiling were black with age. A big bowl 
of cowslips stood on the table, covered with brown, 
shining oil-cloth in the middle of the room; and on 
a Victorian horse-hair sofa against the further wall, 
there lay an old woman, the oldest woman I think I 
have ever seen in my life. She must have been near 
a hundred years old. Her face was so wrinkled and 
her skin so shrunken and white that it seemed, had 
you pricked her cheek, no blood could possibly have 
come. She was asleep. My knocking had not 
wakened her. I crept back to the door, lifted the 
latch, and entered. 

She was asleep. I crossed over on tip-toe to her 
side, and for a moment stood there, listening. Her 
breathing was like the faint stirring of leaves in 
the willow trees by the side of water on a day in 
summer when nothing but a willow leaf is fine enough 
to tell you of the wind. But it was even and regular. 
An old clock upon the wall ticked just twice as fast 
as came her breathing. I counted it. 

It was only for a moment I thought of waking 



i 5 2 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

her. It was more I thought I could not than I could. 
Then I crept out of the room into the back part of 
the house, thinking surely that there I should find the 
farmer's wife. Again, no! My search was not fruit- 
less, however, for in the kitchen there was a cradle 
standing some few feet from the fire — quite safe, — 
and in the cradle there lay asleep a minute little 
baby. To my unpractised eye, it might have just 
been born. For as the old lady in the parlour 
seemed to me the oldest person I had ever seen in 
my life, so this infant appeared to me the youngest. 
And these two, sleeping there in absolute peaceful- 
ness, were the sole guardians of the security of Yarn- 
ingdale Farm. I found no one else — not a soul. 

So then I crept out of the kitchen, my heart 
in my mouth lest I should waken them, and, con- 
tinuing my progress of discovery, found at last the 
dairy. There, on cool dark slabs of slate, were five 
large shallow cans, full of milk. Choosing the one 
on which the cream had scarcely settled — for when 
one is a thief one can still ape the gentleman, — I 
filled my jug and crept back again into the parlour. 
There on the table, beside the bowl of cowslips, I put 
some money, and taking a little piece of paper from 
my pocket I wrote: "I have taken a pint of your 
milk from the dairy without disturbing either of 
your babies." 

Only I wrote it in printed letters, because they 
tell me my writing is vile. 



XXIX 
THE COM PLEAT ANGLER 

I CALLED him compleat because, had he not been 
a fisherman, both life for him and he for life 
would have been the most pitifully insufficient. 
We saw him in the distance as we came towards 
Preston Bagot, and, from the strained motionlessness 




■#£ 



of his attitude, I got it into my head he was at that 
crucial moment in a fisherman's day — not when he 
has a bite, but when he thinks he has. So I ran 

153 



i 5 4 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

down the plank to the tow-line mast and pulled 
the rope. Fanny was only too ready to stop. I 
would not have disturbed him in that moment for 
the world. 

But it was a false alarm, as I soon found out when 
I descended to the tow-path and had come up quietly 
to his side. This attitude of tensity he maintained 
the whole time while I stood and watched him. 

"Any luck?" I asked presently, which is the 
proper and conventional thing to inquire of your 
fisherman, showing, as it does, a lively interest, with- 
out casting any slight upon his skill. 

He shook his head, but never looked up at me, 
never took his eyes from off that red-and-white float, 
depending motionless in the water from the end of 
his line. 

"How long have you been here?" 

" Since breakfast." 

" And caught nothing? " 

He shook his head again. 

" P'raps you've got a bad place?" 

" None of it good round here," said he. But I 
detected no note of regret in his voice; he did not 
say it in the tone of one who yearns for what he has 
not. 

"Then why not give it up?" said I; "you're 
only wasting your time." 

" Nothing else to do," he replied. 

" Why, are you taking a holiday? " 



THE COMPLEAT ANGLER 155 

" All holidays now," said he. 

" How's that?" 

" Little while back," said he casually, " I fell 
forty feet." 

Fell forty feet! My heavens, but he was proud 
of it! That casual voice, that abrupt announcement, 
were both indicative of his pride. He was like the 
pedlar I met outside Wormleighton. He did not 
wish to tell a lie about it. He would never have 
informed me it was thirty-nine feet. That would 
not have been true. No, it was forty feet, and there 
he was to tell the story. 

" I was laid up six months," he continued 
presently — " twelve operations. I've got a silver 
plate in my head — two fractures in my right arm, 
one in my left. One leg's cut off below the knee, 
and I had three ribs broken. Forty feet's a good 
tidy distance, you know. You can't fall forty feet 
without having something to show for it." 

" But do you mean to say," said I, " that that's 
all the damage you received?" 

There is a certain sweetness in the pleasure of 
taking down a man's pride even when he has gone so 
far as to fall forty feet to arrive at it. 

"You fell forty feet!" I continued mercilessly, 
"and that's all that happened to you!" 

Then he did look round at me and with such an 
expression of injured dignity as multiplied my simple 
pleasure a thousand times. 



156 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" Ain't that enough?" said he, "a compound 
and a simple fracture, an amputation, a silver plate, 
twelve operations? Why, one of the nurses said to 
me I was as good as a full hospital to a medical 
student. Well, I know the biggest I ever heard of a 
man falling and still being alive was twenty-three feet. 
I had it sent me — a cutting out of a paper. I fell 
forty." 

" Did you measure it? " I asked. 

" No, but a pal of mine did. It was off of a 
scaffold. When he saw I was alive, he went and 
measured it afterwards." 

It was then I saw how, not only had he achieved 
greatness, but that greatness had been thrust upon him. 

" It must have made you a lot of friends," said I. 

He turned back his eyes to his float. 

" At any rate, they think more of it than what 
you seem to," said he. 

"Oh, I think it's a fine performance," I replied; 
" but I must say, if I'd fallen forty feet " 

" Do you think you'd have more to show for it 
than what I have? " 

" Well, for two days subsequent," said I, " I 
think I should; after that I hope they'd bury me — 
as decently as the circumstances permitted." 

" Oh, yes — you mean it 'ud have killed you," 
he added triumphantly. Then he looked round 
again and sized me up and down. " And I expect 
it would," said he; "but you see I got over it. 



THE COMPLEAT ANGLER 157 

I can come here and fish. I can't work, but I can 
come here and fish." 

"Well, it's mainly a matter of taste," said I. 
" If ever I fall forty feet — and I think twenty would 
be quite enough for me, — we shall find that our 
tastes differ. It's only right that they should. The 
world would be a damnably uninteresting place if 
every man who fell forty feet preferred that it should 
kill him outright rather than leave him with a single 
capacity for fishing." 

He took his line slowly out of the water, and 
very thoughtfully — if, indeed, with a silver plate in 
his head one is capable of any thought— he put 
more bait on the hook. He had probably had it 
in the water since mid-day without any at all. 

I was about to turn away then and go back to 
the barge, when a notice-board on the other side of 
the hedge caught my eye. 

" Notice. — All persons fishing in this water without 
proper leave will be prosecuted. 

£1 Reward 

will be paid to anyone giving information that shall lead 
to a conviction. 

" W. Shakespeare, 

" Preston Bagot." 

" Is this gentleman any relation?" I asked. 
He looked over his shoulder. 
" Of mine? " said he. 



158 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

" No," said I, " of one they used to call William 
Shakespeare. Is his name William? 1 ' 

"I don't know," said he; "they call him Jim." 

I tried to think of something I might say to 
that, but the simplicity of it defeated me. W. 
Shakespeare, and they called him Jim! Perhaps a 
fond mother had christened him William without 
any thought of plagiarism, but with the loving hope 

that one day — you never can tell — he might 

But I took it he had not, since now they called him 
Jim. How merciless and unerring in its judgment 
the public is! 

W. Shakespeare, and they called him Jim! 

That is the subtlest form of criticism I have 
ever heard. 



H 



XXX 

PRESTON BAGOT 

OW did they come into existence, these 
names of the country villages in England? 
Who had a hand in the making of them? 
Lowson Ford, Marston Meysey, Princes 
Risborough, Monks Risborough, Abbots Salford — in 
all parts, in all counties, you will find such names as 
bring pictures to your mind, full already of illumina- 
tion, though never may you have seen the places 
themselves. 

Even Preston Bagot has a sound about it, a sense 
of aloofness which stamps it once and forever with a 
joy of the country. But the names of cities — at least 
to me — mean nothing — Leeds, Birmingham, Man- 
chester; only London has a sound of its own, a 
throb, a pulse, as of some great thing which is alive 
and moving. For the rest, there is not the faintest 
suggestion of choice between them. I would as soon 
go to Leeds as to Birmingham, as soon to Birming- 
ham as to Manchester. Yet suggest but a visit to 
Midsummer Norton, and though one may never have 

159 



160 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

heard of the place in one's life, the very sound of it 
is an invitation. 

I felt as sure I should like Preston Bagot as I 
was certain, when once I had come there, that it ful- 
filled all my expectations. The canal itself wound in 
and out, with countless turnings through meadows all 
in one generous garb of cowslips. Nature seemed 
never so lavish as this spring. If my compleat angler 
was a whole hospital to a medical student, then cer- 
tainly the meadows near Preston Bagot and the woods 
in the Golden Valley were a whole book on botany 
to all those who might wish to read. 

There are at least three, if not four or five, locks 
in the short distance between Lowson Ford and 
Preston Bagot. Their massive arms are the one 
feature without which the landscape of a canal would 
be much the same as any other. It is a fine moment, 
too, when the gates are shut and first the sluices are 
opened. It is not a matter of interest that I should 
count the times, but they were many, when I stood 
at the lock head and watched that first wild rush 
of water bubbling and bursting upwards like the 
eruption of a mighty volcano. There follows one. 
moment then, when the surface of the water is pro- 
phetically still, as though before another and a greater 
outburst. But the second is never so mighty an up- 
heaval as the first, and one by one they diminish 
until there is only that trembling shimmer as when 



PRESTON BAGOT 



i6r 



you see the quivering of heated air against strong 
sunlight. 

And slowly and slowly as she lifts in the rising 
water beneath her, the thick rope fender on the nose 
of the barge grinds with a gentle purr against the 




worn lock gates. These are the things you notice on 
a barge. The life is as quiet as that. 

In some of the canals — as on this to Stratford — 
so quiet is it that I wonder why they keep the lock- 
houses in existence. The work of the lock, indeed — 
so much of it as there is — is left mostly to the lock- 
keeper's wife, while he pursues a more remunerative 



162 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

labour elsewhere. I doubt, in fact, whether these 
people are any longer in the pay of the canal com- 
pany. Doubtless they rent the lock-house in the 
ordinary way of residence, and that is all. 

Certainly at Preston Bagot the good woman, with 
an endeavour to supplement her husband's wages, had 
placed in that window which looked on to the canal 
a piece of paper on which was written, " Here Beer." 

" There's something emphatic about that," said I, 
as the water raised us above the lock side and I found 
it staring at me. 

" Look you, sur, that's a clever woman who put 
that there," said Eynsham Harry. " I never felt so 
close to a glass of beer in my life." 

Whereupon he walked straight up to the lock- 
house door and knocked and the next minute had 
put himself in such proximity with it as allowed of 
no possible comparison. When he came back, he 
laid his hand upon his stomach and with a wry smile 
on his face, said " Here beer." 

It was the only jest he attempted to make in all 
that journey. All other things he said, in which I 
found cause for laughter, were spoken in the char- 
acteristic seriousness of his nature, wherefore I was 
constrained to laugh at them within me, which is not 
wholly unenjoyable. A laugh with oneself is better 
than no laughter at all. 

At some short distance from the lock-house the 
canal winds past the Manor Farm. It must be the 



PRESTON BAGOT 163 

finest example of half-timbered house there is left in 
England. Leicester's Hospital in Warwick seemed 
nothing to be compared with it. 

" That's where I would live," said I, " if I had a 
dog's chance of it." 

" You've said that, sur, of at least four houses 
since we be started." 

i 








" I shall go on saying it," said I, " as long as I 
see places like that. There's no harm in a man 
wishing to live where he can't. He hasn't to pay 
rent for it. If ever the misfortune befell me to find 
all the houses empty that I wished to live in, then I 
might be in a poor way." 

" Well," said he, " 'tis a thing I don't under- 
stand, living in houses. Why a man should put a 
roof over his head and make a wasp's nesty of it, 
wi' one room here and another room there, cutting 



1 64 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

his space up into so many little pieces till there ain't 
nothing left of it, that's a thing I never shall master. 
It seems peculious to me." 

Straightway, then, we began an argument which 
lasted us all the way to Stratford. And upon my 
soul, I believe I got the worst of it. 



XXXI 
A CURE FOR TRIPPERS 

IF I were to write of Stratford-on-Avon, I should 
be doing myself an irreparable injustice. I have 
one recollection of the place, but it is not asso- 
ciated with the time I went there on the Flower 
of Gloster. It will remain with me when I have long 
forgotten the architecture of the Memorial Theatre 
and the Birthplace only clings faintly to my memory. 
I shall, in fact, always keep this recollection. It is of 
a lady dressed in white, seated in a pure-white gon- 
dola, propelled on the waters of the Avon by a gondo- 
lier all clothed in the same colour of virginal sim- 
plicity. Whenever I hear of Stratford, I think of that. 
We should never have gone into the town this 
time, only that we needed supplies, for there was a 
long detour to be made before we came to Tewkes- 
bury, upon which I had set my fancy. I wanted to 
make my way through Gloucestershire and the Cots- 
wold Hills, and when it came to the next morning 
I shirked the brunt of that beating back; for we 
must go over our own tracks almost to Birmingham 

165 



1 66 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

before we reached the junction of the Worcester 
Canal. Now I could not bear the thought of Bir- 
mingham again, so I sent Eynsham Harry back on 
the barge with instructions to meet me next day at 
Evesham. 

" I'll join the canal there," said I, " and walk 
along the tow-path towards Tewkesbury till we meet. 
Have you ever traded on the Evesham Canal before? " 

" No, sur, and 'tis my belief there's scarce a boat 
goes along there now — not unless they be steam." 

" Well, we can't make any mistake," said I 
cheerfully. " It's the river Avon, and I have it here 
on a map; 'tis navigable. I shall walk straight on 
from Evesham to Tewkesbury, and we shall meet 
somewhere on the way." 

We never met for some days, and then not until 
I reached the wharf at Tewkesbury. But little mis- 
calculations like this will happen in the best of well- 
planned journeys. I should have missed almost the 
best part of the adventure had I not buckled my 
knapsack to my shoulder and set out from Stratford 
that morning to walk to Evesham. 

Now, if I had not done this — which in itself was 
a treachery to all my scheme of a journey on a barge — 
what should I not have lost? The fact of the matter 
is, you must wear out at least one good pair of boots 
if you are to know anything about the country in 
which you live. And once I had started, I could 
have worn out ten pairs, only that it was arranged 



A CURE FOR TRIPPERS 167 

that I should join the Flower of Gloster on the 
next day. 

Seven miles out of Stratford you come to the 
little town of Bidford, with its bridge of many angles, 
which has borne the weight of Warwickshire traffic 
for four hundred and thirty years. In the days of 
King John, this same Bidford was the dowry of the 
Princess Joanne, when she was wed to Llewellyn, 
Prince of North Wales. Wonderful days were those, 
when a king could thrust his hand into the purse of 
his kingdom and draw forth such a dowry as this for 
his daughter's marriage. I wonder what would be 
the expression of feeling in Clapham if that idyllic 
spot were given away as dowry to a foreign prince? 
You never know — it might become quite fashionable. 

Yet, notwithstanding all the romance of its past 
history, Bidford has but little interest now. In the 
last twenty years it has been cruelly modernised, due, 
doubtless, to the fact that it has become the haunt of 
the Birmingham tripper. I am sure the tripper is a 
necessary evil. They must find the light of air after 
days of darkness in these black cities. But between 
the tripper and the ordinary traveller there is all that 
difference which exists between the wasp and the bee. 
The one goes about in swarms, eating and drinking 
on every possible occasion; the other you will find 
but singly, heeding nothing but the pursuit of his 
labour. 

I shall never forget the sight of a half-eaten 



168 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

packet of dirty ham sandwiches lying cast away on 
one of the windows at Versailles. In every village, 
in every place of beauty or interest, there should be 
a poisoned public-house to catch the thirsty tripper. 
He would die as willingly as any wasp in a poisoned 
bottle; what is more, he would die in a complete 
sense of gratification, feeding himself until that 
moment when oblivion came softly to his side, and 
the packet of half-eaten sandwiches would drop from 
his lap on to the floor. 

If only this were done, there would be no orange 
peel in Petit Trianon, and Bidford might still have 
been a dowry fit for any princess. 



XXXII 

AN OLD NUNNERY 

SOON after I had left Bidford I met two old 
women with white sun-bonnets and sun- 
browned faces, who directed me on my way 
to Evesham. 
" Turn first turn to the right," said they in a 
chorus, " and keep on away past the nunnery." 




" The nunnery? " said I. 

" The nunnery," said they, and on I went with 

quickening steps. 

169 



i 7 o THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

At first sight of it, this old nunnery in Abbots 
Salford almost took my breath away. It was an 
annihilation of all time. I was back again — if indeed 
I had ever existed in that period — in the days of 
Queen Elizabeth. Had a man walked down the 
grey slabbed path to the lichgate entrance in a silk 
hat and a tail coat, I should straightway have 
clapped him into armour or blotted him out of my 
sight altogether. 

It would seem that scarcely a stone has been 
altered and, except for a small addition which was 
made to the house some two or three hundred 
years ago, now well hidden by trees, it must be just 
the same as it was in the days even long before 
Elizabeth, when the little nuns kept their farm and 
fed their poor and saved their money. 

The floor within the great high hall is stone- 
huge slabs of grey toned rich with yellow age, which 
make you shudder to think of the coldness of the 
winter nights. I rambled all over it from cellar to 
roof, paying my sixpence — which is the charge — to 
the little girl who, thank God, so unlike a guide, took 
me from room to room with a whispered "Would 
you like to see the priest's hole?" "Would you like 
to see the dormitories? " 

I liked to see everything, and I think the dormi- 
tories, where all those little sisters slept like sparrows 
close beneath the roof, was the most redolent of the 
history of the place. It was one colossal chamber, 



AN OLD NUNNERY 171 

stretching with its massive beams from one gable to 
another. Here, in one long row, there was accommo- 
dation for at least thirty sleepers; for, as I strongly 
suspect, they had no beds raised from the ground, but 
slept on straw mattresses ranged along the floor. 

At each end of this great room, lighted, not 
with small dormer windows, but fine, high mullioned 
spaces that looked wide across the breadth of country 
and flooded the interior with light, there was a recess 
where doubtless the sisters slept in charge of all the 
little nuns. 

I cannot help calling them little, for however 
big she may be in stature, a nun is slight in mind 
— a child, whose thoughts will never grow into 
womanhood, who will never know a greater pang 
than death, which indeed she woos as though he 
were a lover. 

Two hours I spent within the nunnery, peopling 
each room, for it was a place that gave you a thousand 
stories without one effort of yours in the creation of 
them. 

Only the chapel disappointed me, for that is still 
used as the Roman Catholic place of worship in the 
district, having all the signs of modern Catholicism 
about it — the cheap finery, the gaudy altar cloth, 
the ill-painted pictures of the journey of the cross 
around the walls. 

When once I had seen that, then the spell of 
the place seemed to be broken and I left it, wishing 



172 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



I might have carried my memory of it away without 
just that one discordant note. 

Yet I suppose it is better to believe than to feel. 



,•" 'Ai.;-: " 



*HBB| 











III f 






■ 




% 









The few who come there to that little chapel gain 
a thousand times more comfort from their Mass and 
Benediction than should I have done in keeping 



AN OLD NUNNERY 173 

the feeling of the place alive in my memory by its 
absence. 

" The selfishness in this world," said I, as I 
walked back to the lichgate entrance, " the selfish- 
ness in this world is abominable." 

Now, I have always noticed that when a man's 
conscience makes it imperative that he should accuse 
himself, he does so in the meanest way possible. He 
generalises. " The selfishness in this world," says 
he. Had he to credit himself with a virtue, he 
would give the world none of it, and phrase his 
sentence in a very different way. 



XXXIII 
F LAD BURY MILL 

jAT Evesham begins the so-called navigable part 
/% of the Avon. I knew directly I had reached 
/ % it that I had all the walk to Tewkesbury 
before me, for Eynsham Harry was quite 
right— nothing but steam barges could make their 
way in that water. The tow-path had long been over- 
grown; only here and there could I discover signs of it. 

So I put my best foot foremost and reached 
Fladbury that evening, where I agreed with myself 
to stay the night. 

There was something about Fladbury Mill and 
Fladbury Ferry which brought me back to those 
days when I was a child. Had I spent the first ten 
years of my life at Fladbury Mill, I should have had 
a more splendid time even than 1 had in a house on 
the edge of a wood, which fulfilled for me then all 
the great mysterious qualities of a real forest. For 
in Fladbury Mill and the river running by it, in the 
broad, tumbling weir, in the secret waters, and the 
deep, deep lock behind the mill, I could see all the 
possibilities of a thousand inventions, adventures that 

174 



"differ 




176 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

would have lasted well through the long summer 
holidays, and held all their interest and enchantment 
until the term be sped again. 

Instead of Mrs. Wicks, who surreptitiously used 
to give me of her gloriously home-made toffee from 
the buttered frying-pan in which she was wont to 
make it, I can see Mrs. Izod, the ferry-woman at 
Fladbury, supplying me with radishes from her bas- 
kets. This does not please me in contemplation quite 
so well as the place itself, for radishes would never 
take the place of home-made toffee — never! But all 
the rest of it, that was full of tales just waiting to be 
spun out of the palpitating imagination of some child 
living at the mill. Maybe they are being told now; 
maybe they were being told that day when I was there, 
by the two children, a boy and girl, who were rowing 
up the river in a leaky old boat — quite possibly those 
tales were being told then; those adventures were 
afoot under my very eyes, only I had grown too old 
to realise them. I am glad, however, that I was not 
so old as that I could not see their possibilities of 
them myself. 

With just a boat, such as those two children had, 
how real could Red Indians become in their birch- 
bark canoes at Fladbury Ferry! What pirates' ships 
could not be made out of any old thing that floated 
on the waters of a river in such a place as that! 

For some long time — an hour, it may well have 
been — I sat down by the ferry-slip and thought of 



FLADBURY MILL 177 

all the splendid things that could be done with only 
two essential possessions — just childhood and a boat. 
How easily might that sleepy mill become the frown- 
ing Tower of London, to which, by water and the 
Traitor's Gate, all prisoners were brought for execu- 
tion! How easily might all the stirring history of 
England be written through again at Fladbury Mill, 
with just childhood and a boat! 

For childhood, like Nature, can make history 
with whatsoever comes to hand. It is only when he 
has reached to man's estate that a child must build 
castles, set precious stones in crowns, and pave the 
streets with gold before he can write a year into the 
book of history. . 

And Fladbury Mill is such a spot where a pair 
of children, unbridled and free, could set all history 
a-humming with their deeds. I wish I had been 
born at Fladbury Mill! How many thousands of 
times Mrs. Izod, as, lazily, she pulled the ferry-boat 
from one bank to another, would not have found 
herself attacked by a pirate's cutter, boarded, and 
every passenger thereon made to deliver up their 
wealth and walk the plank! It would only be pre- 
tence, that walking the plank, I have no doubt, but 
still, a matter easily accomplished while one looked 
the other way, lest in their pretence the illusion had 
been spoiled. 

This is but a little of all that Fladbury brought 
to me as I sat by the ferry-slip and watched the 







•iff 







FLADBURY MILL 179 

water tumbling down the weir. I even caught my- 
self speculating on a race between two flat flecks of 
foam as, collecting at the bottom of the weir, they 
started off down the river, neck and neck. 

Here, too, the swallows were skimming the 
water; up and down, up and down, with endless 
passages, never seeking rest. I could hear Bellwattle 
in my imagination asking, with wide eyes of wonder, 
" Do they never sit down?" But it seems as if they 
never do. 

And then — the more mature, perhaps thereby 
the less complete of all the pleasures I found in 
Fladbury — I sat on a bank of the river where a crab 
tree glowed with pink in fullest bloom, and listened 
to a trio of three nightingales, who sang and sang and 
sang until it seemed that not a note was left in all the 
compass of music which they had not touched. 

I have often wondered whether the nightingale 
was really so fine a songster as repute would have 
him. Sometimes it has seemed that only because 
he sang when all the rest of the world was silent 
has his voice won him a spurious reputation. And 
when I have heard the notes of a blackbird rising 
above all the other sounds of day, I have seriously 
been in two ways about it. But that evening at 
Fladbury, when the sun was dropping fast behind 
the square tower of Fladbury church in the distance, 
I was left in no doubt of it. A. thrush was singing 
somewhere. I heard the blackbird's note as well; 



180 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

but they none of them could match my trio. There 
were passages in that song which the mere transcribing 
to the written stave would desecrate for ever. For 
they sing that music which you would rather never 
hear again unless by such executants. 

It was while I sat there listening that an old 
woman — sun-bonneted as most of them are — came 
round the river meadows gathering sticks and dan- 
delions. In her passing from one field to another, 
she had to climb a stile, but refused all help of mine 
in surmounting it. First she handed over her sticks, 
then her apron-full of dandelions, lastly she climbed 
herself. 

" You're very independent," said I. 

" 'Tis a good thing to be, sur, while 'ee can. 
If you be round these parts next year, maybe I'll be 
glad to taking help of 'ee." 

" And what are you doing? " I asked. " What 
are the dandelions for? " 

" They be for wine, sur. My old man likes his 
draught of it after the hot days. He says it be as 
good as any cider, the way I makes it." 

"And how do you make it?" 

" Three quarts of blossoms," said she, " to a gallon 
of water, three pounds of sugar, the juice of lemonses 
and oranges, and when loo-warm mix yeast." 

" When's it ready for drinking? " 

" In three months, sur — three months to brew. 
There be some as drinks it in a week or so, but I 



FLADBURY MILL 181 

keep mine three months, and I have had some as has 
been in brew a year. 'Twas well called wine, my 
old man said — he got quite jolly over it one day, 
he did." 

" And did you scold him for that? " said I. 

"Well, I did begin, sur; but he did say such 
good things about the wine as I'd made, I couldn't 
find it in me heart. And he made us all laugh, 
he did, the way he said things. I've never seen 
him the same like it since." 

" P'raps you don't make the wine so well," said I. 

" Oh, sur, indeed I does my best." 

" Then I expect you wouldn't really be so very 
sorry if you saw him like that again." 

" Well," said she, and her head hung very 
thoughtfully, " I sometimes wonders perhaps if he 
did once take a little drop of it tnn mU ch, I might 
know 'twas to his liking." 

" It's a difficult matter," said I, and I hung my 
head as well, " but it's always the way in this world "; 
and here I spoke very sententiously, as though I 
would add philosophy to ease her difficulties. " It's 
hard to know," said I; "you want to make it to his 
liking, and he never tells you what he thinks of it 
unless he takes a drop too much. Well, we all 
have problems like this to settle. Life's not so easy 
as it looks." 

" Indeed, it is not, sur," said she, and, bobbing 
me a curtsey, she picked up her sticks and her apron- 




J 




FLADBURY MILL 183 

ful of dandelions. I stood and watched her till she 
hobbled out of sight. 

" My God!" said I to myself, "if the best of 
us could be no more beset than that! " and I pictured 
the prayer she would pray that night to help her 
in her difficulty. Surely the essence of all comedy 
and tragedy must be in prayer. If only one could 
hear them all! 

By this time my trio had ended their choiring 
and had left the crab tree. I walked back in an 
evening silence then through the meadows, and Mrs. 
Izod ferried across from the village slip to the mill 
to fetch me. 



XXXIV 
WOOL-GATHERING 

SOME years ago, Nafford Mill was burnt to the 
ground. No, not to the ground, for the four 
pink-washed walls of it still stand with their 
sightless windows facing the evening sun like 
a palace built upon a Venetian canal. All the interior 
is gutted. The charred beams have been left to rot 
upon the ground; the great iron wheels and shafts, 
distorted into wild shapes by the fierce flames that 
embraced them, are lying there now in a debris of 
bricks and mortar. Its only roof is the open vault of 
heaven. Now the heavy mill-wheel is quite still, 
the water trickles over its slimy plates, for the chains 
are all rusted and broken and it will never revolve 
again. 

Yet notwithstanding all this devastation, the wide 
stretch of the Avon here would be incomplete with- 
out its mill at Nafford. It stands there at the foot 
of a steep green slope of grass where on the crest a 
small thatched farm-house lies down in the shadows 
of the apple orchard and gazes through its dim 

184 



WOOL-GATHERING 185 

latticed windows to the purple heights of Bredon 
Hill. 

I suppose in its days of labour, NafTord Mill lent 
more to its surroundings than it does now; then I 
have no doubt the splashing of the water as it turned 
the old mill-wheel, the gentle whirr of the machinery 
within, and all those peaceful sounds which accom- 




panied the daily grinding of its heavy stones, made 
such music in the place as, to those who know their 
Avon well, must now seem desolate in all its silence. 
But to one who has never seen it otherwise, NafTord 
Mill could not well be more splendid than it is. I 
liked its lonely air, its sightless windows, and its silent 
wheel. The walls, as they stand deep down in the 
clearest water, might well be made of marble when 



i86 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



the sun is shining on them. And all that fulness of 
apple-blossom which spreads in the orchard around 
the hill only adds to the almost transparent suggestion 
that it gives. Indeed, through the higher windows 
as you look upwards from below, the blue sky glistens, 
and it seems not like a building of solid brick at all, 




Aaiisfeia 






but an enchanted palace full of the light of air and 
gleaming sunshine. 

From Fladbury I came to NafTord, by way of 
Eckington Bridge and Eckington village, and much 
as I enjoyed the company of Eynsham Harry, yet 
they were glorious were those few days when I 
walked alone down the banks of the Avon. 

Of the countless bridges I passed in that journey, 
I think Eckington is the most wonderful, the most 
picturesque of all. It must date back some consider- 



WOOL-GATHERING 187 

able number of years before that of Bidford, for 
even now it is the only means of transport between 
Pershore and Tewkesbury with the exception of one 
single ferry across the river. For awhile I stood 
in one of its niches where the cautious pedestrian 
may secure himself against the close passing of the 
heavy traffic, and there I watched the waters 
below me flowing onwards and onwards to the 
ultimate sea. 

There is no place in the world so suitable to 
reflection as the bridge which spans a gently flowing 
stream. For whether it be wool-gathering, as I 
strongly suspect was much the case with me, or 
whether it be a flight into the highest realms of 
philosophy, it is equally pleasant, equally the place 
above all others. Herr Teufelsdrockh, had he stood 
upon a bridge over the Rhine looking down into the 
flowing waters beneath him instead of being seated in 
his garret beneath the stars, would have arrived at 
a more far-reaching philosophy even than that of 
clothes. There is something in flowing water so 
constantly and compellingly changing, something 
which both arrests yet carries on the feeblest of 
imaginations, that to stand upon a bridge and watch 
its even, passing ripples must impel the mind to think, 
and to think, moreover, of things made mysteries by 
the mutable laws of life. It is coming from whither? 
It is going whence? And therewith your mind 
begins its journey from the far-off mountains to the 



188 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

distant sea, until, lost in the limitlessness of a dim 
horizon, you inevitably return unto yourself, the 
minute yet living atom standing upon that bridge in 
the silent country — you, the smallest speck in this 
great ocean of space, who, in the flash of an eye, can 
cast your mind into the distant corners of the earth 
and yet are there, still standing as I was upon the 
bridge at Eckington. 

It meant nothing — I got no further; yet at 
moments I had that feeling which Eynsham Harry 
had so deftly described— I felt that I was on the 
verge of one of the greatest secrets of the world. It 
seemed to grow so simple until, from the sheer 
greatness of its simplicity, it escaped my grasp, and 
once more I found myself wildly struggling in a 
seething whirlpool of complexities. 

It was no good. I knew that I could arrive at 
nothing, for I was no more than as one particle in all 
that volume of water which had passed beneath me 
as I stood upon the bridge of Eckington; I was no 
more than a drop being carried on and on, just 
capable of locating myself, of speculating upon my 
existence while in the narrow river of life, then lost 
again, perhaps lost forever in the limitless eternity 
of the sea. 

I left the bridge at last. My wool-gathering, or, 
as no doubt I may have called it, my philosophy, had 
brought me nowhere. However much it strives, the 
mind cannot escape the body; however far it travels 



WOOL-GATHERING 1 89 

into space, it must return. In no little feeling of the 
despair of it all, I walked on then into the village. 

At the very entrance of it there stands a Roman 
cross, around which, on summer evenings, the old 
people sit and gossip. Sometimes they call them 
butter crosses, for here, some 
two hundred years ago, they 
came on butter-market days 
to sell their wares. 

With the exception of its 
old Norman church, Ecking- y ... r 

ton is just the quiet Worces- ; 
tershire village, having no 
particular beauties to recom- ^S/jlS 

mend it. But in its day, I ^Jikm^l^^im^j^ 
fancy that Eckington was 

bigger than this; its close proximity to the bridge 
must in other days have made it a common resting- 
place. 

Through Eckington, then, I passed on to Nafford, 
where in the little thatched farm cottage I was given 
a dish of tea, and set out afterwards to climb to the 
summit of Bredon Hill. 

Half-way up this hill, from the crest of which it 
would almost seem that the whole of England lay 
stretched before your eyes, stands Woolas Hall with 
its fine old tapestries and its minstrel's gallery. I 
gather this information from the book of a Mr. 
Charles Showell, who, more fortunate than I, was 




190 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

admitted to see the place, and has drawn in his book 
of the Avon a picture of the fine old gables of which 
I could catch but a glimpse while the groom was 
informing me that only friends of the house were 
allowed to come within. 

This, as I believe I have said before, is quite as it 
should be. If an Englishman's home really be his 
castle and his flag is not concealed within the boot- 
cupboard but flying royally and egotistically from his 
flag-staff, then the intrusion of a stranger within his 
gates must be little less than an abomination. I 
certainly deserved to be turned away. In these 
matters a vagabond deserves everything he gets. So 
really I never saw Woolas Hall; but what with a 
glimpse over the coachman's shoulder and such 
imagination as not even an English gentleman can 
deprive me of, I can picture the glorious place 
that it is. 

Yet better than any mansion was the sight of 
the country from the summit of Bredon Hill. 

" God," said I, as I stood up there and gazed 
across the wide stretches of fields so many hundred 
feet below me, " God is more generous of his 
pleasures than is any man." Which, by the way, is 
what one only has the right to expect. 



XXXV 

APPLE BLOSSOM 

IT was a whole village wrapped in apple bloom. 
And in the light of that sunset, like snow on the 
mountains, it was burnished with a glow of pink. 
You could scarcely see the cottages for all those 
sheets of blossoms; indeed, at a distance, as I walked 
towards it, only the square tower of the old Norman 
church rose above this mass of burning white. 

This is the village of Little Cumberton in the 
month of May. It is a colony of apple orchards. 
They surround every cottage, make the greater acreage 
of every farm, and almost every garden, it seemed, 
had one or two trees to bear them fruit. 

To add to this, the cottages themselves, half- 
timbered, are washed white between the beams; the 
trunks of the apple trees are all painted with lime as 
well. Never did I see even linen more spotlessly 
white than was this little village in the shadow of 
Bredon Hill. If ever Nature can be said, where the 
presence of man is unavoidable, to look immaculate, 
it was here. But immaculate is not really a good 

191 



192 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



word. It has so often been used to describe the mod- 
ern dandy in all his glory of attire, that it has lost 
the meaning for which alone I use it. Little Cum- 



- 









berton was immaculate, but only to those who know 
what I really would infer. 

I stayed the night there in an old farm-house in 
the heart of the village. Their garden also had its 



APPLE BLOSSOM 193 

apple trees; it had its tulips, its forget-me-nots and its 
aubrietia beside. The farmer's wife had her eye for 
colour. But she had planted her tulips in lines so 
straight that when your eye ran along them as they 
stood beneath the windows, you could see how uneven 
were the old walls of the house itself. 

The latticed window of my bedroom looked over 
clouds of apple blossom to the narrow street of the 
village. I asked that my bed might be moved across 
the room and placed directly under the window. 
This was done with all the willingness in the world; 
and when it came to ten o'clock, I retired, undressed, 
and lay beneath the clothes beside the open window 
watching the light of the moon as she drifted through 
a fleet of clouds which seemed to lie at anchor over 
Bredon Hill. 

There is as much a joy in sleeping close to 
Nature as there is in being close to her awake. 
Again and again I closed my eyes, when there would 
creep into my mind the never ceasing stir of traffic 
which echoes through every hour of a London night. 
And though it was now more than three weeks since 
I had heard it, the sound of it plainly reached my 
ears. It was not until I had opened my eyes again 
to watch the silent traffic of the moon across those 
dark streets of the sky, that the real stillness of the 
world came back to me. 

The last thing I remember was the soft crv of an 
owl, and then, perhaps I only imagined it, I thought 



194 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

I saw something heavy and white fly cumbersomely 
out of the darkness of the trees across the light of 
the moon and into the darkness once more. I may 
only have imagined it, for the next moment I was 
asleep. 

In the morning I woke early. The sun was on 




Pi 



'■ 










my face, a slight breeze was tapping the branch of a 
climbing rose against the window pane. 

I turned on my side and looked out. The village 
was still asleep. Presently I heard a dog barking — 
those short, excited yaps as when he is eager about 
his business. Then there came a flock of sheep, 
followed by an old shepherd and the dog himself. 
The shepherd was taking them up to their pasture 
on the hills. A little cloud of dust from the white 
road wrapped around them as they walked. Before 



APPLE BLOSSOM 195 

they reached the end of the street it folded them 
out of sight. I heard the dog barking now and 
again in the distance, and before the sound of it had 
died away, there came the sharp snap of a window- 
catch let loose. I heard the rattle of the latticed 
panes as they swung back against the wall of the 
house. It was the village stirring — just awake. 



XXXVI 
TEWKESBURY 



TEWKESBURY has not suffered as have Ban- 
bury or Bidford. It is as old as the hills, 
you might say — and without fear of hope- 
lessly being plagiarist, for the hills surround 
it. So far as I understand, rather than having in- 



I 




creased its trade, Tewkesbury has lost it. Some of the 
old mills are empty now — the wharves are deserted. 

196 



TEWKESBURY 197 

There I met Eynsham Harry again, faithfully in 
charge of the Flower of Gloster, waiting with an even 
and contented mind for me to fulfil my promise and 
turn up eventually by the canal side. When he saw 
me approaching, he came forward to meet me with 
that strange lateral swing of the hands which all 
bargees have acquired from long walking between 
the locks. It seems to help them to their pace, for 
they swing to every step with an automatic action 
which is inseparable from their stride. 

" I told 'ee, sur," said he first thing, " that 
'twas only steam-boats they'd take down from 
Evesham." 

" It makes no matter," said I. " It isn't because I 
like boating so much that I'd have anything to say 
against Shanks's mare. She's an amiable beast, and '11 
go mostly anywhere." 

" You rode, then, sur? And here have I been 
wasting my sympathies on you, thinking how you'd 
be a-walking. But who might be Mr. Shanks? 
I've never heard of 'en." 

I explained. I should have thought the phrase 
might have reached him; but they have queer phras- 
ing of their own. Not that I heard much of it from 
Eynsham Harry. I often thought that notwith- 
standing he could neither read nor write, yet he was 
rather a cut above the rest — perhaps because they 
could. 

" Well," said I, " there are three more days before 







~ t . 



TEWKESBURY 199 

our month is up. I'm going to take a stroll round 
the town, and then we'll start. I want to go through 
the Golden Valley and then on to Lechlade." 

" I'll get provisions, sur, and whenever you're 
ready, that am I." 

So I walked round the old town of Tewkesbury. 
It is full of strange crevices, and at every turn there 
looms above the house-tops the splendid tower of its 
historic abbey. A lot of the work in it, dating from 
the twelfth century, still remains in wonderful pres- 
ervation. But thank heavens, I know nothing about 
these things, and cannot even talk of architraves and 
bastions in such a way as would make this chronicle 
too dull for any but an architect's apprentice. 

The sight of it delighted me, none the less. At 
every corner as it rose above the old Tudor buildings, 
it reminded me of Rouen. How well, indeed, they 
have preserved their atmosphere there. It is the 
town as it was, and Tewkesbury is much the same. 

There are passages in the streets there, thrust 
secretly in between the houses where you would least 
expect them. Glance down them, and you might 
almost believe the sixteenth century were back again. 
Old half-timbered gables lean across the narrow 
spaces until they well-nigh touch each other. All 
this is bound to create a sense of mystery even to the 
dullest imagination. 

I wished then, when once I had seen a little of it, 
that I had time to see it all. It is so closely written 



200 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



into the pages of England's history that it is a lesson, 
if it be nothing else. And I for one, at least, have 
need of such teaching. But having walked down 







two or three streets and being come but half-way 
down a fourth, I saw a crowd of men and women 
gathered round some man, to whom they listened 
while he talked with flowery gestures and that so- 



TEWKESBURY 201 

called persuasive tone of voice. Now, had the kings 
of England all been buried at Tewkesbury, I would 
rather have stopped to listen in this crowd than see a 
whole row of their tombs. 

The man who can hold a crowd is worth listening 
to, whatever rubbish he may be talking, and it is 
mostly rubbish that you hear. I stayed once to listen 
to an orator in Hyde Park. 

" Mr. Heggarty will now speak to you on Home 
Rule," said a voice, and thus the new-comer was 
introduced to his audience. For half an hour he 
held them spell-bound. They turned open mouths 
to him, swallowing every word. Yet for half an 
hour that man never finished one sentence, never 
made one complete statement in all the words that 
came between his lips. 

" He's a grand speaker," a man in the crowd 
whispered to me in an awed voice. 

"He is indeed," said I: "what's he saying?" 

" I don't know," he replied abstractedly — " he's 
talking about Home Rule"; and then his mouth 
opened once more as he returned the fulness of 
his attention. 

" I wonder," said I, as I walked away, " I wonder 
if that's the secret of success in the noble calling of 
politics? " 

But this was no politician in the High Street of 
Tewkesbury. He was none the less striving to con- 
vince his public of what God knows he could never 



202 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

have believed himself. He was offering painlessly to 
extract their corns with the filthiest instrument I 
have ever seen in my life. 

" Ladies and gentlemen," he was saying as I came 
up; and that was wise of him, they liked that very 
much. One and all, they felt constrained to listen 
when he addressed them so. 

" Ladies and gentlemen," and with his flowery 
gestures waving his awful forceps about him he 
kept back all small children, who crawled in 
through people's legs, " if any one of you is sufferin' 
the tortures as come from sweaty feet, let him sit 
down here openly on this chair as I've got for the 
purpose, let him sit down and have his collosities 
painlessly removed. I don't mind whether they're 
hard or soft, white or black, let him sit down here, 
and in less than thirty seconds he shall have his 
collosity in his hand, roots, fibres, and all." 

Then, as he surveyed the crowd for a likely 
patient, his comprehensive glance fixed steadily on 
me. I felt a sudden consciousness of my feet at 
once. They say, if you look at a person's boots 
it unnerves them. It is sufficient for a chiropodist 
to look you in the face. What is more, I am sure 
that everyone else in that crowd upon whom his 
wandering eye chanced to fall, felt just the same 
as I. In fact, I saw them gaze down nervously 
at their boots, and if the glance continued, they 
would then stare at the buildings opposite, as 



TEWKESBURY 203 

though they were more concerned with what was 
happening there. I stared at the buildings opposite 
myself. 

He was a greasy fellow, this journeyman. With 
his soft black hat, his long yellow hair, and his black 
frock-coat, he was much more like a photographer 
than the chiropodist he called himself. 

" George Schofield is my name," I heard him 
saying presently, when I felt it safe to return the 
full meed of my attention. " I'm a professor of" 
chiropody — a surgeon chiropodist. Now, when I 
say professor," he continued, " I don't mean a self- 
titled idiot. You've 'ad some people coming 'ere 
to Tewkesbury — I know 'em — I've met 'em. I've 
stood in the crowd same as you're doing now, and 
I've 'eard the nonsense they talk. Professors!" His 
contempt was large, comprehensive. A young farm- 
hand, meeting his glance, withered visibly beneath 
it. " Why, I've seen one of them almost bleed a 
poor woman to death, the way he hacked at her. 
Now, that's not my way. With this little instrument 
in my 'and," he held out the rusty forceps, that all 
might see it who chose, " I'm an artist. I've had 
my degree at a college. I'm not only known in 
Stroud and Gloucester — I'm known all over the. 
country. I've extracted collosities from nearly all 
the crowned heads of Europe." 

I suppose wearing a crown upon your head has 
much the same effect as wearing boots upon your 



2o 4 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

feet. It was the first time I had ever heard it, 
and, in any case, is not a nice thing to think 
about. 

" Well, now," he went on, " if anyone has a 
collosity and wants to be operated on, let him not 
be ashamed. If he's done no sin let him not be 
ashamed. Lady or gentleman, there ain't no harm 
in any of these people seeing your feet. Don't 
be modest about it. Why, I've got a letter 'ere — 
there's 'ardly a post but what I don't get one — from 
a lady I operated on in London." He began feeling 
first in one pocket, then in another. " It was from 
a lady in 'Ornsey. I took three corns out of 'er 
one foot. Now, where is that letter? Well, any'ow, 
she thanked me for what I'd done — thanked me from 
the bottom of 'er 'eart. That was the way she put 
it — ' from the bottom of my 'eart.' ' Walking,' she 
said, ' is a pleasure. Where before I used to drive 
in my motor,' she said, ' now I can walk.' " 

" Dommed if I'd walk an' I'd a motor," said 
some envious fellow in the crowd. 

"You wouldn't," said Schofield; "but these 
ladies in London likes a little walk now and then — 
keeps 'em fit. They don't get no other exercise. Pay- 
ing an afternoon visit, they like a walk sometimes." 

Especially, thought I, those ladies in Hornsey. 

" Well — 'oo's going to take a seat? " persisted the 
professor. " You don't mean to tell me that with 
all the work you 'ave to do, gentlemen, keeping the 



TEWKESBURY 205 

'ome going, that you don't 'ave corns! Why, there 
was a gentleman in Stroud — retired, 'e was — retired — 
living on 'is own. 'E never 'ad no work to do at all, 
and 'e ad six corns — three on one foot, three on the 
other. 'You sit down, Mr. Capel,' I said — that 
was 'is name—' you sit down, and I'll take 'em out 
for you in as many seconds.' He didn't believe me 
at first. ' I've been suffering with these,' said he, 
' for four years,' he said. ' You'll only suffer six 
more seconds,' said I. So 'e sat down, and in a whiff 
they was all lying on the floor by the side of 'em. 
' Ah,' said he, ' you've done very well with those 
corns, Schofield; but I've got something even you 
can't tackle.' ' What's that? ' said I. ' An ingrowing 
toe-nail,' said he. ' Sit down there again,' said I, ' and 
I'll have it out in two minutes.' 'What!' said he. 
' Yes,' said I. 

"Well, I took it out, and he was proud of it; he 
was going to put that along with the six corns in his 
pocket to show to his wife when he got 'ome. But 
I stopped 'im there. ' Oh no,' said I, ' if you take 
the toe-nail, I must 'ave the collosities.' So I got 
'em — we split the difference, and 'ere they are"; 
and, taking a bottle from a black bag on the ground, 
he held up those touching remembrances of his art, 
which, when he shook the bottle, floated nebulously 
in some dirty liquid before our eyes. 

There comes a moment when even an orator of his 
persuasion loses hold upon his audience. It was at 



206 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



this moment that Mr. Schofield, surgeon chiropodist, 
lost his hold upon me. I edged my way out of the 



1& 



fc? 





|- J 



■ 




crowd, and, far down the street I could hear his voice 
still raised in tireless eloquence. At last there was a 
lull. I looked back over my shoulder. His soft black 



TEWKESBURY 207 

hat no longer rose above the crowd surrounding him. 
I guessed, then, he was operating at last. The artist 
was at work. I hurried on with a sharp pain sud- 
denly tingling in my feet. 

Now, of course, I wish that I had seen more of 
Tewkesbury instead of listening to the cajoleries of 
this journeyman chiropodist. Yet in those two 
short hours before we started upon the last stage 
of our journey, I saw much to make that time a 
memory. There is great nobility in it. The ring of 
battle still lingers in its name. They say Queen 
Margaret weeps 0' nights in Bloody Meadow for her 
son. If the departed spirits still cherish the sorrows 
which they knew on earth, then I am sure she must, 
for Tewkesbury is full of the spirits of the past. 



XXXVII 
THE GOLDEN VALLEY 

WHEN you join the Thames and Severn 
Canal at Stroud, it is but twenty-eight 
miles and a few odd furlongs before you 
come to Inglesham, where the water of 
the canal joins the Isis and all signs of the tow-path are 
lost to you for ever. But those twenty-eight miles are 
worth a thousand for the wealth of their colour alone. 
Immediately you have come to Brimscombe Basin 
and the high land, studded with the grey Gloucester- 
shire houses, begins to rise at either side the canal, it 
is no longer the English scenery you might expect, 
but like mountain villages in Switzerland, thousands 
of feet above the level of the sea. I have seen villages 
in the heart of the Apennines which reminded me of 
Chalford and St. Mary's crossing. The mills and the 
factories with blue slate roofs make a colour against 
that golden distance, the distance of the Golden Val- 
ley, to which, through all those little villages on the 
hill-sides, you feel you are always leading, slowly and 
surely, like a miner who knows that the day will come 
when he shall strike his reef. There is an aura of 

20S 



■ ' V, 



■' / 













210 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

gold everywhere. The distance is no longer blue — 
that is more the colour of all the nearer foreground. 
But away beyond it there is a mist of gold into which 
all tones and shadows melt like metal cast into a 
furnace. Mills and factories, blue slate roofs and 
grey houses! All this sounds impossible; but it is true! 

Wherever there is a field in which pasture is left 
to grow, there the grass is of a golden green, accen- 
tuated, there is no doubt, by the sheets of cowslips 
which are spread everywhere in every open space. 

Yet this is but the beginning of the Golden Valley, 
the long courtyard to that garden through which you 
must pass before you come to the great gates which 
give you entrance to this deep valley of gold. And 
all along by the side of this paved courtyard there 
grow in broad white feathered masses the flowers of 
cow-parsnip. At one spot, on a pathway the other 
side of the canal, there is a door set in a wall that the 
path itself may continue. Here was the greatest 
cluster of all. I pointed them out to Eynsham Harry. 

" Nature has a wonderful eye for effect," said I, 
" when she sows her flowers. Look through that 
doorway. Where could you get a better place for a 
mass of those cow-parsnips?" 

His eye followed my hand. 

" 'Tis the fault of most people, sur," he replied, 
" when they plants gardens, to have things in rows, so 
you can count how many there be. I never had a 
garden myself — we none of us do, a-boating, — but 




.-m 








- 



212 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

when I sets some cowslips or blue-bells in a bowl on 
the cabin, I puts them all in a lump. They looks 
better that way." 

I remembered then how many a cabin roof I had 
seen decked with a bowl of wild-flowers. I had seen 
birds in cages too, carried through their own fields 
and meadows, chafing against their captivity. I 
asked him if he could explain that. 

He shook his head. 

" Look you, sur," he said presently. " There be 
some persons in this world as have no more sense of 
the feeling of dumb things than what they'd have of 
a stone. What's more, they'd think you was daftie if 
you said them birds weren't made to sing in cages, 
and had no more taste for it than you and I would 
have for a week's job on the treadmill." 

" 'Tis more customary," said I, " for them to call 
you a sentimentalist — though no doubt your people 
mean much the same when they call you daft. Both 
accusations are supposed to make you feel ashamed of 
yourself." 

" Well, sur, if I could open the doors of half the 
cages I sees on the boats, I wouldn't mind how 
ashamed I felt. Most like I should get over it, which 
is more'n the bird 'ud do if he was left in the cage." 

Soon after Chalford, the grey houses with their 
blue slate roofs grow fewer in number, the hills at 
each side become higher; there are broader pasture 
fields; a stray farm or a lock-house is all you can see 



THE GOLDEN VALLEY 



213 



of human habitation. In the nearer distance, the 
dense woods spread over the rolling land and, like 
an army in glittering mail, with golden trappings 




and with coloured plumes, they march down the hill- 
sides to the water's edge. 

This part of the country must be the most 
luxuriant in the whole of England. In a half-hour's 
ramble through those woods while Eynsham Harry 
was preparing the mid-day meal, I counted seventeen 
various sorts of wild-flowers then in bloom. There 
were bluebells and orchis — those deep-red purple 



2i 4 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

orchis with their spotted leaves which, in the midst 
of the dark violet of the bluebells, made such colours 
as they wore in the great days of Rome's Empire. 
Could the imperial toga have been indeed as imperial 
as these? 

I found the cuckoo-pint as well, its livid finger 
in that pale fragile sheath of green. There were 
nettles, red and white, but with such bloom as would 
shame many a hot-house plant in London. Veronica 
was there, with its tiny blossoms that might match 
the cobalt of any Chinese dynasty you liked to 
name. Garlic I found, and primroses hiding from 
the heat of May, the last I knew that I should see 
that year. The violets grew so thickly, I could scarce 
but tread them down. Ground ivy crawled in every 
open space and, with roots dipping in the cool water, 
there were forget-me-nots, king-cups with blossoms 
of metallic gold and lesser celandine, aping the 
glories of their sovereign. 

I found strawberries in blossom and the purple 
flowers of common bugle. There was Herb-Robert 
with its brilliant scented leaf, stitchwort and salvia, 
I have no doubt I missed a great many more. 
There must have been knotted figwort, there must 
have been white and purple comfrey. I saw no 
plants of willow herb, yet they must have been there 
as well. But I had no time to count them all, their 
abundance was so overwhelming. 

And with all these jewelled flowers, imagine a 



THE GOLDEN VALLEY 215 

valley of gold. The leaves of the countless trees all 
set before you in the golden flush of youth; the fields 
upon the other bank dipped in the gold of a myriad 
buttercups and cowslips; the sunlight streaming on it 
all from a cloudless sky in May — gold — all gold — a 
priceless valley paved in gold and precious stones. 

When I came out from the shadows of those 
woods into the sunshine again, I could only stand 
and wonder, wonder what any man would say — his 
first words — if on a magic carpet I could whip him 
up from the grey streets and plant him there where 
I stood. It would probably be something in the 
nature of blasphemy, but acceptable nevertheless to 
the God who made it all — far more acceptable as 
a genuine meed of praise than any prayer of thanks- 
giving grudgingly offered in a consecrated church. 

I returned silently to the barge; as silently sat 
down to my mid-day meal. Presently I became con- 
scious of the fact that Eynsham Harry was watch- 
ing me while I eat. 

" What is it? " I asked. 

" I be waiting for you to taste that dish, sur," 
said he. 

It was a dish of green vegetable, looking as much 
like spinach as anything else. I thought it was 
spinach. 

"Where did you get it?" I inquired. 

" Would you be so good as to just taste it, sur," 
he repeated. 



216 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

I obeyed, looking up at him as I did so with that 
pensive expression which I am sure all professional 
tasters must adopt. You must put on an expression 
when you specialise. It is part of your uniform, 
whether it be in the tea factory, the pulpit, or the 
house of parliament. All specialists are actors. 

" Tastes like asparagus," said I. " Where did you 
get it from? " 

Still he would not tell me. 

" You like it, sur? " he persisted. 

I tried another mouthful. 

" It's better than asparagus," said I. 

" Put a little pepper wi' it, sur." 

I put a little pepper and tasted again. 

"By Jove," said I, "it's damned good! Where 
did you get it? " 

He pointed to a line of hedge half-way up the 
hill. 

" There be hops growing up on that hedge, sur," 
said he; "these that you're eating be the young 
shoots, cut off about six inches from the top and 
boiled the same as other greens. In the month of 
May we takes 'en whenever we can. The wilder 
the better." 

" I'll remember that," said I; and I have, but can 
find no hedges in London where the wild hop-vine 
grows. I shall think of it, however, when next May- 
time comes. I shall surely taste that dish again. 



XXXVIII 
THE GOLDEN VALLEY— continued 

FOR more than three miles the canal divides 
the wooded hills, a band of silver drawn 
through this valley of gold. Lock by lock 
it mounts the gentle incline until it reaches 
the pound to Sapperton Tunnel, and at the summit 










y-K-A 







• 






spreads into a wide basin before it passes into the 
last lock some few hundred yards before the tunnel's 
mouth. 

217 



218 



THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



The whole way from Stroud upwards is almost 
deserted now. We only met one barge in the whole 




journey. An old lady with capacious barge bonnet 
was standing humming quietly to herself at the tiller. 



THE GOLDEN VALLEY 



219 



That was the only boat we found on those waters. 
The locks are, however, good; some of them have 
only just been made within the last few years. But 
the draught of water is bad; in some places we just 
floated, and no more. It was stern work for Fanny 








then. There were times when I thought the tow- 
line must give way, the strain upon it was so great. 
In one short pound more shallow than the rest, 
we came upon two little boys bathing. One was 
swimming manfully, making great pace and great 
commotion, struggling as though for dear life; while 
the other, knee-deep in the shallow water, stood by 
in undisguised admiration. I strongly suspect the 



220 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

swimmer had one leg upon the bottom. I could 
always swim so well like that myself. I know too 
how splendid it looks, for if you make a splash 
enough there is not a soul can see. 

After our meal we went on through the rest of 
this wonderful valley. It was golden to the last. 








Even in the water itself the weeds grew more luxuri- 
antly than I have seen in any river. In and out of the 
forests of trailing weed the fish moved mysteriously, 
like mermaids in a fairy-tale. It was all a fairy-tale 
beneath that water. There were dense growths, and 
then clear spaces on to which the sunshine fell in 
brilliant patches. The pen of Hans Andersen could 
have found many a story in that magic country 
beneath the still water of the canal. 



THE GOLDEN VALLEY 221 

At the top of the valley, looking down between 
the hills through a lattice-work of apple blossom, 
stands the Bricklayers' Arms, a little inn with two 
or three houses clustered round it. An old man there 
described to me the opening of the tunnel in the 
reign of George IV. He had not seen it himself. 

" My big grandfather" — this was how he told 
it to me — " my big grandfather, the day the tunnel 
was opened, he was walking down the tow-path, and 
he met a feller coming along, and he said to my big 
grandfather, ' Where are you going, my man? ' i I'm 
going to see the king,' he says. ' I am the king,' says 
the man, and gives him a guinea; and when he looked 
at the head on the coin, I'm dommed if it worn't." 

It was rather nice, that little touch of human in- 
credulity. I can see him comparing the likeness with 
that of the head on the coin, catching the face in 
profile before he finally made up his mind that he 
was being told the truth. 

The passage through that tunnel of Sapperton, 
which, on a sudden bend of the canal, opens a deep 
black mouth into the heart of the hills, was the only 
time when the voyage of the Flower of Gloster had 
in it the sense of stirring adventure. Into the grim 
darkness you glide and, within half an hour, are lost 
in a lightless cavern where the drip drip of the 
clammy water sounds incessantly in your ears. 

Some time ago, when there was more constant 
traffic on this canal, there were professional leggers 






- " 



s 




,.. • Kr.tr ■ *.~ 








v 

fa. 



THE GOLDEN VALLEY 223 

to carry you through; for there is no tow-path, and 
the barge must be propelled by the feet upon the side 
walls of the tunnel. Now that the barges pass so 
seldom, this profession has become obsolete. There 
are no leggers now. For four hours Eynsham Harry 
and I lay upon our sides on the wings that are 
fitted to the boat for that purpose, and legged every 
inch of the two and three-quarter miles. It is no 
gentle job. Countless were the number of times I 
looked on ahead to that faint pin-point of light; but 
by such infinite degrees did it grow larger as we 
neared the end, that I thought we should never 
reach it. 

"What used the leggers to be paid?" I asked 
after the first mile, when it seemed all sensation had 
gone out of my limbs and they were working merely 
in obedience to the despairing effort of my will. 

" Five shillings, sir, for a loaded boat. Two and 
six for an empty one." 
I groaned. 

" A pound wouldn't satisfy me," said I. 
" No, sur, I suspects not. It's always easier to do 
these things for nothing." 

For an hour that was all we said. For an hour I 
legged away, thinking how true that casual statement 
was — " It's always easier to do these things for 
nothing." It is — always. All labour would be play 
were it not for payment. The man who reckons is 
worse than lost, he is made; than which there can 



224 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



be no more bitter a punishment. Once, then, the 
labourer is paid, he begins a-reckoning of his hire, and 
that is all. From this come revolution and anarchy. 

But one does not think of this sort of thing for 
long while legging it through Sapperton Tunnel. A 
drip of shiny water on one's face is quite enough to 
upset the most engrossing contemplation. I saw the 
pin-point of light growing to the pin's head, and still 
we laboured on, only resting a few moments to light 
a fresh piece of candle or take breath. 

It was evening when we came out into the light 
again and, though the sun had set, with shadows fall- 
ing everywhere, it almost dazzled me. A barge in 
the next lock rose above the lock's arms, with every 
line cut out against the pale sky. 







' 



r% 




''*■* *■*.,>*■ 




XXXIX 
HARD-BOILED EGGS 

THE sense that an adventure is drawing 
towards its close makes the future look 
somewhat desolate and uninteresting. After 
Sapperton and the Golden Valley I felt as 
if the end had come already, though there were many 
miles of water to traverse before we reached the last 
lock at Inglesham. 

I was harking back over the last three weeks, 
the amazing sunlight in it all, the glorious country; 
sitting, I have no doubt, in an attitude somewhat 
disconsolate. We were passing under the bridge at 
Latton, where the road runs over the canal and 
frames with its arch an orchard where the buttercups 
throw back the sunshine into the apple trees. 

225 



226 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

" You be very thoughtsome, sur," said Eynsham 
Harry presently, whereby I made certain he had 
been watching me. 

" I'm thinking, 1 ' said I, " that in a few days I 
shall be back again in London, and the band will be 
playing Gilbert and Sullivan in Charing Cross Gar- 
dens. There will be a roar of traffic from the Strand, 
and a dull incessant thunder of the trams along the 
Embankment. By eight o'clock the whole night will 
be full of light signs. Lipton's tea, Dewar's whisky, 
and Californian wines will be blaspheming the sky. 
Paper-boys will come shouting past my windows of 
murders I'd far sooner not know about. There may 
be a piano thumping its notes discordantly against 
the music of the band. I shall see the people through 
the windows of the Hotel Cecil feeding themselves, 
and waiters running here, there, and everywhere with 
plates. That's what I'm thinking about. It's enough 
to make you think, when your holiday is over. And 
talking about feeding, what have we got for lunch?" 

Eynsham Harry shook his head. 

" There's still a piece of that tongue, sur, and 
I can do wi' bread and cheese myself." 

But that was not what I wanted at all. I thought 
of the chandler's shop where I often get my eggs, 
of the ham-bone which lies on a plate in the window 
and for ever seems to be in the last stages of boniness. 
I should soon be eating those eggs for breakfast again, 
and wanted, for the last time, perhaps, till next sum- 
mer, to taste an egg with all its country freshness. 



HARD-BOILED EGGS 



227 



" I want some eggs," said I. 

" There's no place, sur," said he, " nearer than 
Marston Meysey where you might get 'en." 
" And how far's that? " 
" Well, sur, you come along the canal here two 




miles and get out there at a bridge. Tis then two 
miles by the road." 

" I'd walk more than that," said I. 

"Then Marston Meysey's your place," he replied; 
and to the village of Marston Meysey, when we had 
come to the bridge he spoke of, I started off to get 
my last meal of country eggs. 

It is a winding, twisted road to this little village, 



228 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

with high hedges at either side. Most of the way 
it was more lane than road. At every turning some 
other lane led out of it, till I had almost lost my way 
and began to despair of ever reaching this Marston 
Meysey where I was to find my country eggs. Two 
young women driving in a farmer's trap over a 
narrow bridge that spanned a stream came to my 
rescue. 

" Turn," said they, " to the right where 'ee see 
the barn, then go on for half a mile; but don't turn to 
the left. Turn to the right again, and follow the 
lodigraph wires. 'Twill take 'ee straight into the 
village." 

"Have you just come from there?" I asked. 

They nodded their heads, and the flaps of their 
linen bonnets with them. 

" Well, can you," said I, " tell me where it's 
possible to get some new-laid eggs? " 

" They be sold at t'baker's. 'Tis on the right of 
street as 'ee go into the village." 

I found it right enough then, one of those country 
villages in England " the world forgetting, by the 
world forgot." It must be miles from anywhere; 
far from the main road, a miniature colony of people 
contained within themselves. 

The baker's was not a shop: just a bake-house, 
which was a part of an old building standing some 
twenty odd yards off the village street. In the cobbled 
yard before it was an old leaden pump, and, with a 
drip of water falling close to his nose, an old dog lay 



HARD-BOILED EGGS 229 

beneath the spout contentedly asleep until I entered 
the five-barred gateway into the yard. Immediately 
he heard the creak of the hinges, he was on his legs 
and threatening me with a thousand imprecations if 
I came a step closer. 

" Poor old feller," said I. 

He knew that sort of cajoling, and would have 
none of it. 

"You're a cross old fellow, aren't you?" I went 
on persuasively. 

He said that that had nothing to do with it. I 
had no right in that yard. And I have no doubt 
the argument would have gone on without my getting 
a step nearer, had not a girl come out of the house, 
telling him just what she thought of him and 
where, if he were worth anything as a dog, he would 
be lying at that moment. After that he walked 
sulkily away, muttering under his breath words to 
the effect that she did not know human nature as 
well as he did. 

" You'd let anybody in," said he. 

" Go and lie down," said she. 

" That's all you can say," he muttered. 

" Go and lie down," she repeated, and she stamped 
her foot. 

" Don't think much of that for an argument," he 
growled, and he tumbled into his barrel, resting his 
face between his paws, never taking his eyes off me. 
Even then, he could not keep quite silent, but con- 
tinued to mumble in a deep note under his breath the 



230 THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

word " Thief." If you say it in a guttural way 
yourself, you can just imagine the sound of it. 

" He doesn't like strangers," said the little girl. 

"Whereas you trust everybody," said I. 

" It depends what they look like," she replied. 

It was as good as asking me to speak of myself, 
and as no man refuses such invitation when it is 
proffered him, I asked her if she meant that she 
passed me as trustworthy. She eyed me shyly, 
making me remember that I had not been in the 
company of her sex for one whole month. 

"Well?" said I — and as I said it, I felt my eye 
meet hers. Now whether there was that in my ex- 
pression which conveyed my thoughts to her intuition, 
I would not swear, but she blushed. Then she looked 
charming, and her eyes dropped. At that moment 
the dog said " Thief " again. 

" Shall we leave it at that? " said I. 

"At what?" 

" At what the dog said." 

" I didn't hear him," said she. 

" Perhaps it's as well," said I. " Now hadn't I 
better tell you what I want? " 

She nodded her head and, because she thought we 
were about to begin business, raised her eyes again. 
Accordingly I talked business steadily— the business 
about the eggs — for five minutes. The woman who 
has said she will never speak to you again is always 
amenable to conversation if you talk business. You 
may mean what you like — in fact, the more you 



HARD-BOILED EGGS 



231 



mean, the more ready is she to talk. Whenever I 
stopped and she found me watching her, she would 
say no more. So I asked that the eggs might be 
boiled then and there. 

" I want them for lunch," said I, " and have got 
no place to boil them in." 





: 



" I thought you said you were on a barge," she 
replied. " Haven't you got a stove in the cabin?" 

"Thief!" said the dog in the barrel. 

" That's quite true," I answered, and I took no 
notice of the dog. " We have a stove and a saucepan 
and an egg-timer. I told the lie in order to stop 
a little longer and talk to you." 



232 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 

Now when you tell a lie to a woman and she 
knows it is a lie, she is so amazed when you admit it 
that she takes it as a compliment. A barefaced 
truth only insults her. What is more, the admission 
of the lie will often make her laugh. And that is a 
mood when a woman will forgive you anything. 

The little girl took the four brown eggs without 
a word, put them in a saucepan with some water and 
placed them on a fire which was already burning in 
a little niche in the wall. She just added a stick or 
two, pouring a few drops of paraffin over it to make 
the whole blaze up. 

" I want them hard," said I. 

" You shall have them hard," said she. 

For a while then, we stood together and watched 
the water boil. Once I looked out of the corner of 
my eyes at her face to find her staring down into the 
saucepan, her whole expression full of contemplation. 

" A penny," said I suddenly. 

She started. 

" One penny," I repeated. 

" Not for twenty pence," said she. 

" Which means," said I with that intuitive ego- 
tism of my sex, " that you're thinking about me." 

" Do you think a thought about you would be 
worth twenty pence? " she asked. 

"Thief!" said the dog in the barrel. 

" Not to speak," said I, and I ignored the dog 
again. "It 'ud be worth more than twenty pence to 
conceal." 



HARD-BOILED EGGS 233 

She bent down and looked into the saucepan. 

" It's boiling," said she. 

" So am I," said I, " with curiosity." 
" How are you going to take the eggs? " she asked 
— " in your pocket? " 

" I'll take them," said I, " as you give them to 
me, in my hand." 

"Then I'll put them in a bag," said she. 

And so she did when they were boiled. With her 
little hand wrinkled already with hard work, she held 
out the bag by one corner and I took it by the other. 

"And now," said I, "how much?" but somehow 
I hated asking it. 

" Two pence," she replied. I don't think she 
minded in the least. It is only men who are senti- 
mentalists over these matters. They have no head for 
business when they have a heart to count the coin. 

"But two pence!" I exclaimed. "There were 
four — four eggs." 

" Halfpenny each," she replied. 

" But the boiling? " 

" I won't charge you for that," said she. 

" You can charge me anything you like for the 
boiling," said I, stooping to bribery, as is the habit of 
the best of us — " you can charge me anything you 
like if you'll tell me what you were thinking about 
just now." 

" I won't charge you for the boiling," said she. 

"Fool!" said the dog in the barrel. 



XL 
DIETETICS 

EYNSHAM HARRY had begun his lunch 
when I returned. A piece of cheese was 
f balanced on a piece of bread, and on its way 
to his mouth as I came over the bridge. 
" I've got four eggs," said I. " You must have 
two." 

" Bread and cheese be all I want, sur," he replied. 
And it was all that he ate. It is surprising how 
little they need, these men whose day is one of 
strenuous labour from morning till evening. I 
thought again of the diners and the waiters in 
London, of the people who consume three and four 
courses for lunch, six or seven for dinner and a few 
hours later seat themselves down to supper— not with 
an appetite, never with an appetite, but always with 
the capacity to eat. I thought of the people them- 
selves, men and women who, at the utmost, had 
done three or four hours' work in the day — the 
majority of them no work at all — men and women 
who had never earned a meal in their lives; some 

234 



DIETETICS 235 

of them who had not even made the money to pay 
for it. 

" Oh, you must have an egg," said I. " They 
are already boiled." 

He shook his head. 

" Well, how on earth," I exclaimed, " do you 
manage to live on so little? Sometimes you eat 
an egg for breakfast, bread and cheese for lunch, 
occasionally a piece of meat for dinner. There 
are people in London who haven't done half your 
work, eating meat five times a day and in twenty 
different ways and dishes. Meat for breakfast, 
lunch — even meat sandwiches at tea; then dinner 
and supper." 

" How do they manage to get it down, sur? " 

" I'm damned if I know," said I. " I suppose 
much in the same way as you tramp ten miles 
to find a bird's nest. It's part of their amusement. 
They could no more walk ten miles than you could 
eat what they do." 

" Well, sur, then I be glad I be a-boating. I 
suppose they'd make fun of my bread and cheese. 
Oh, I be glad I be a-boating. It's good for the 
stomach. Isn't there anyone to tell them how they 
be upsetting their insides?" 

" There was a play written once," said I, " holding 
them all up to ridicule. They went to see it in 
hundreds and thousands, but every one of them 
thought how well it applied to his next-door neigh- 



236 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



bour. They knew of everyone whose vice was over- 
eating — everyone but themselves." 

" Well, that be strange, sur. London's a 'mazing 
city. They say everything takes place there; but 
it seems to me that everything takes place outside, 







and there they only talk about it. Politics be only 
talk. The country's governed by the people who 
work. If a new measure's passed, it's because men 
have been working to make the need of it, and 
they build great houses for folk who can say a lot 
of words, so that they can talk about what's been 
done, and not one of 'em knows the way to do it. 
Do you see this old feller coming along here?" 



DIETETICS 237 

I looked and, under the bridge, drawing after him 
a tight punt-shaped boat, came an old man with white 
hair and a soft hat that partially concealed it. 
I "Who is he?" I asked. 

" He keeps the hedges along the canal in order. 
Trims them up a bit so that the horses can pass by." 

u But no barges do come along here, surely? " said 
I. "We haven't seen one all the way from Sapperton." 

"Don't say that to him, sur. He goes on 
working here day after day all year round, and 
every night he goes home he expects to find a letter 
from the Canal Company telling him he ain't wanted 
no longer. Don't tell him we haven't seen no barges, 
sur. He'll ask me first thing, and I shall tell him 
we see one at Kempsford, that place where the canal 
runs through the village with a high garden wall 
on one side and apple orchard on the other." 

" That's the last place we came through," said T. 
" I remember it. But tell me, this' old fellow gets 
the pension, doesn't he?" 

" He gets it — yes, sur; but he don't spend it." 

"Why not?" 

" He prefers working, sur, and this is the last 
job he'll have." 

He had come up with us by this time, dragging 
his boat, now nearly filled with the cuttings of the 
hawthorn hedges, which no doubt he took home for 
burning. 

"Good morning, gentlemen!" said he. 



238 THE "FLOWER OF GLOSTER" 

" Good morning! " we replied. 

" Have 'ee seen a barge coming down this wiy 
from Sapperton? " 

"One," Eynsham Harry replied: "went back 
from Kempsford yesterday morning." 

His face brightened, and not only with pleasure, 
but with recognition. He remembered Eynsham 
Harry, and sat down on the side of the barge to talk 
with him. I looked at his face then. He had the 
clearest and the bluest eye I have ever seen. It might 
have belonged to a child, yet he was well over seventy. 

"Will you have some food with us?" said I. 

" No, thank 'ee, sur. IVe had my bit a good 
hour ago." He pointed to a red and white-spotted 
handkerchief that lay, wrapped about a bowl, in the 
bottom of his boat. 

" Well, come now," he continued, taking no 
more heed of me, but addressing himself directly to 
Eynsham Harry, " 'ee saw a boat. There hasn't 
been one down these ways, not so far as Inglesham, 
come the fourth o' last month. I don't know what 
they be going to do about this canal — there gets less 
water in her every day, and I keeps at it keeping down 
the hedges; but you won't see a bit o' horse dung on 
the tow-path not between here and Inglesham." 

" Well, as long as there's any traffic at all," I 
interrupted, " they won't close it up as long as you're 
alive." 

" I should be glad to be sure of that, sur. I've 



DIETETICS 



239 



written two letters to the people at Gloucester, asking 
'em if they thought they wouldn't require my services 
any longer to let me know, so as I could get work else- 
where; but I gets no answer, only every week my little 
bit of money. So I don't like to give the job up." 

"No! You stick to it, Willum," said Eynsham 
Harry, " a horse on the path is better'n two in the 
stable. You stick to it." 

He nodded his head, fully appreciating the advice. 
We saw him later, when he had gone away, stopping 
at a hawthorn bush which overhung the path. He 
was lopping off the protruding branches and throw- 
ing them into his boat. 











"M&bkJ&r 



T 



XLI 

THE LAST LOCK 

"^HE same evening we arrived at Inglesham, 
where the canal opens wide into a broad 
basin, across the still water of which the 
reflections of the high poplars fall with 
every quivering leaf faithfully traced again. 

Along this last pound, between Dudgrove Lock 
and Inglesham, we passed without saying a word. 
Most of the time, in fact, Eynsham Harry walked 
on ahead with Fanny on the tow-path, leaving me 
to take my last hand at the tiller. It is an occupa- 
tion to which you get so accustomed that it becomes 
as mechanical as the mere exercise of walking along 
the path. Nothing short of complete aberration 
would lead you to swing the tiller wrong. I have 
seen a woman steering while at the same time she 
prepared a meal and nursed a baby. Every now and 
again she would disappear into the cabin to fetch 
some dish or other, but never did she steer into the 
bank or meet the awkward corners beneath some 
bridge. Steering had become as much a mechanical 

240 



THE LAST LOCK 



241 



matter as that with me. I scarcely knew the tiller 
was in my hands. 

At last, as we entered the basin by Inglesham 
Lock, I saw Eynsham Harry lay a hand on the tow- 




242 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



line. Fanny stopped at once, and the rope sagged 
loose into the water. 

" Here's the end of my journey," said I to myself, 
and I stepped down into the cabin to get my knap- 
sack, which was already packed. When I came up 
again, Eynsham Harry was aboard up forard. 

" This be Inglesham, sur," said he. 




I nodded my head, and strapped my knapsack to 
my shoulder. Then we entered into arrangements 
about his taking the Flower of Gloster back to Coven- 
try, where it was to be delivered in good order to Mr. 
Phipkin, after which we strolled to the lock head 
and stood there for a while looking down into the 
deep basin. Even there the poplars found their re- 
flection. Indeed, they are truly princesses, always 



THE LAST LOCK 



243 



standing before some pool 
to gaze at their own faces. 

" Well," I said at last, 
" this is the end of it. Here 
we part company," and I 
held out my hand. He 
shook it in a mighty grip. 

" If ever 
you be want- 
ing, sur," said 
he, " to come 
a-boating a- 
gain, just 
write to me 
at the lock- 
house at Hill- 
morton, out- 
side Rugby, 
and I'll take 
'ee out as long 
a trip as 'ee 
likes on the 
Henrietta. That's my boat 
— called after my wife." 

" I'll work my way," 
said I, "if I'm competent." 

" Oh, you be competent, 
sur, so be you get up early 
enough of a morning." 




244 



THE " FLOWER OF GLOSTER " 



" I shall suit my ways to yours," said I, " even 
when it comes to a matter of bird's-nesting." 

Then he held out his hand, and we shook again, 
after which I turned on my heel and set off across 
the meadows for the town of Lechlade. Once I 
looked back. He had turned the barge round in 
Inglesham Basin; Fanny was hitched again to the 
tow-line, and the Flower of Gloster was on her home- 
ward journey through those water-roads of England, 
back to her town of Coventry once more. 




U 1911 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
DEC S W 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 905 786 8 







m 



